• Isabel Macedo Almeida, Isabel Silva Fonseca, Diana Malheiro Mota, Idalina Brandão Beirão, and Sara Mendes Moreira.
• Instituto de Ciências Biomédicas Abel Salazar. Universidade do Porto. Porto. Portugal.
• Acta Medica Port. 2022 Nov 2; 35 (11): 807-815.

IntroductionCommunication in clinical practice is essential to healthcare quality, especially in Oncology. The Patient Assessment of Communication Experiences questionnaire evaluates the perspective of cancer patients towards communication and identifies areas that can be improved. This study consists in its translation and validation to European Portuguese, to identify these areas.Material And MethodsWe performed a descriptive, observational, cross-sectional study. The translation was conducted according to the World Health Organization's guidelines. We applied the questionnaires to a convenience sample, in patients under systemic antineoplastic treatment at the Day Hospital of Centro Hospitalar Universitário do Porto, between January and March 2020. We calculated the Cronbach's Alpha for each phase of care, the bivariate and multiple correlations and, for each question, the percentage of "non applicable" and most positive answers.ResultsWe had 100 participants. The instrument we obtained ha good internal consistency, but the classification of some questions does not correlate sufficiently with the global opinion about the experiences with communication in the respective phase. The diagnosis phase revealed a lower proportion of positive experiences, particularly in terms of receiving the bad news.ConclusionThis study translates and validates part of the communication assessment instrument PACE to the Portuguese language and elicits the necessity to invest in the phase of diagnosis and disclosure of bad news.

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