Assessing Medication Beliefs of Mental Health Professionals: The Portuguese Version of the Medication Alliance Beliefs Questionnaire

Abstract

Introduction

Clinician's attitudes are an important consideration in implementing adherence strategies and that these attitudes can be successfully improved as a result of training. The 22-item Medication Alliance Beliefs Questionnaire (MABQ; Byrne et al.2008) was used to assess clinician attitudes towards non-adherence. The MABQ contains five subscales reflecting the clinician's self-efficacy (adequacy), the satisfaction (work satisfaction); their appraisal of their self-worth (self-esteem), their outcome expectancies (pessimism) in relation to non-adherent patients, and the extent to which they understand the difficulties patients might experience in trying to adhere to treatment (empathy).

Aims/objectives

To develop the Portuguese version of the MABQ.

Methods

The MABQ was translated and adapted for Portuguese language. The translation was done by the first author (AC). The accuracy of this translation was discussed in a two focus group of experts, providing opinion on face and content validity. After pre-testing, the final version of the Portuguese translation was produced.

Results

A convenience sample of 65 mental health professionals working in a variety of settings is being collected. The average score in MABQ was 80.06 (SD 9.5). The value of internal reliability coefficient α was 0.80. The intraclass correlation coefficient of total MABQ score was 0.35. The t-test showed that there were no statistically significant differences between the mean values of the measurement scale at two different times (80.4 vs.76.2; P = 0.02).

Conclusion

The attitudes of mental health professionals may have a predictive relationship with treatment outcomes of patients with mental health disorders. The validation of the Portuguese version of MABQ will provide professionals with a new tool to evaluate crucial issues related to medication beliefs.

Disclosure of interest

The authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.