The Dutch version of the Oral Health Assessment Tool: Translation and inter-rater reliability among community nurses

Objectives: Translating the Oral Health Assessment Tool (OHAT) into Dutch and assessing the inter-rater reliability among community nurses. Methods: The original version of the OHAT was translated following the five stages of the 'Guidelines for the Process of Cross-Cultural Adaptation'. After a forward and backward translation, consensus on the pre-final version was obtained in an expert panel discussion. This version was pre-tested on its comprehensibility among 31 nurses and hereafter finalized. Then, inter-rater reliability of the OHAT-NL was determined by two trained nurses during oral assessments of 37 care-dependent community-welling older people. Intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) and the Cohen's kappa statistic for individual items were estimated. Results: Feedback from nurses in the pre-test did lead to minor changes of the OHAT-NL. Inter-rater reliability was good (ICC 0.79; 95% CI 0.63-0.89) on the total score. Agreement on item level ranged from fair to very good, the kappa ranged from 0.36-0.89. Conclusions: OHAT is now available in Dutch having good inter-rater reliability among trained community nurses. Future research can further validate the OHAT-NL and develop intervention according to total OHAT-NL scores.