Construção e validação da escala de conhecimentos e práticas sobre saúde ocular na infância para profissionais da estratégia de saúde da família

Abstract

Vision is very important for child's development. The number of visually impaired people in Brazil and worldwide, financial, social impacts of this deficiency are alarming, the percentage of low-income population is large and the preventive actions related to ophthalmological problems are very important. Investigating the knowledge and practice of professionals who work in the Family Health Strategy on childhood eye health is important in order to evaluate whether, in fact, the recommendations from Ministry of Health since 2013 have been followed, to the vision for the population. Objective: To develop and validate the Scale of Knowledge and Practice on Ocular Health in Childhood for Professionals of the Family Health Strategy. Method: The scale was elaborated based on the Directives of Attention to the Ocular Health in the Childhood - 2nd edition. It consists of 13 questions, with responses categorized as Likert-type scale, related to the identification of risk situations for prenatal and child eye health and appropriate intervention, functional assessment of vision, signs and symptoms related to ocular health and gauging of visual acuity. To validate the clarity and content of the instrument, the scale items were presented to a multidisciplinary team of 9 professionals with ocular health experience and the agreement percentage was analyzed. The instrument was also submitted to the pilot test and applied to 30 professionals of the target population. The degree of agreement between them was evaluated by calculating the Content Validity Index (CVI). The construct validity was verified by the internal consistency analysis, analyzing the items by the Rash Model and the Cronbach's alpha calculation in a sample of 150 people. Results: In the validation of content, all items had concordance percentage greater than or equal to 80% by the judges. In the CVI analysis, during the pilot test, all items were maintained. The internal consistency analysis presented Cronbach's alpha of 0.556 for the Knowledge subscale and 0.778 for the Practices subscale and in the item-by-item analysis none of the items undermines this subscale. Considering the full scale, the alpha is 0.684, showing good internal consistency. The Rasch model analysis demonstrates that the scale is valid, the subscales are one-dimensional and no item distorts the measurement. Conclusion: The scale of childhood eye health knowledge and practices for family health strategy professionals has been successfully developed, presenting content and construct validity.