Translation and validation of a tool to assess the impact of clinical pharmacists' interventions

Background The tool CLEO in French language is designed for estimating the potential relevance of pharmacists' interventions (PIs) in three independent dimensions with regard to process-related, clinical, economic, and humanistic impact. Objective We aimed to translate CLEO into German (CLEO; de; ), to demonstrate its feasibility in daily practice, and to validate the German version. Setting Convenience sample of three Swiss hospitals with established clinical pharmacy services. Method We translated CLEO according to the ISPOR Principles of Good Practice. The potential relevance of PIs performed within a 13-day period of routine clinical pharmacy services was then estimated with CLEO; de; . Ten clinical pharmacists experienced with CLEO; de; subsequently completed a 19-item questionnaire to assess user's agreement on appropriateness, acceptability, feasibility, and precision of the tool. Additionally, each pharmacist evaluated 10 model cases with CLEO; de; . Main outcome measure User satisfaction; interrater reliability and test-retest reliability. Results CLEO; de; was used to estimate the potential relevance of 324 PIs. The reported time needed to complete a single estimation was less than 1 min. The use of CLEO; de; was seen as appropriate, acceptable, feasible, and precise. Interrater reliability was good for the clinical and economic dimensions and was poor for the organisational dimension; test-retest correlation was strong for all three dimensions with excellent to fair reliability. Conclusion We present CLEO; de; as a validated tool in German language suitable to estimate the potential relevance of PIs. After further refinement of the organisational dimension, CLEO; de; could provide a qualitative value to quantitative information on PIs.