Introduction:

Palliative Care is part of the general practitioner’s professional activity and should be taught during undergraduate training. The European Association for Palliative Care has described the ten core competencies in Palliative Care and despite the need to assess the student’s acquisition of these competencies during undergraduate training, no instruments existed to make such an assessment.

Objective:

To develop and validate an instrument called PalliComp to assess the acquisition of competencies in Palliative Care among medical students.

Method:

The authors devised 30 statements based on competencies and submitted them for evaluation by Brazilian specialist doctors and teachers using the Delphi method, with previously established criteria (quality of the writing, adequacy of the content to the competency and general quality of the item). The experts assigned scores and identified corrections for each item. The items were approved the average score exceeded 70%. After approval, the instrument was applied to a sample of fourth year medical students. For validation, the sample data were evaluated using Bartlett’s sphericity, Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) tests and Cronbach’s alpha coefficient.

Results:

Of the 33 specialist doctors and professors located in the country, 24 agreed to participate in the content evaluation. Approval was achieved in the fourth round of the Delphi method. Of the 30 statements initially developed, 24 remained in the final version of the instrument. Of the 80 students enrolled, 71 responded to PalliComp. The statistical study showed that it was an identity matrix with adequate correlation (Bartlett’s test p <0.001), relatively compact and poorly dispersed correlation patterns (KMO = 0.63) and internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha coefficient = 0.73).

Conclusion:

The PalliComp instrument was successfully developed and validated to assess the acquisition of competencies in Palliative Care among medical students.

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