To Örebro University

Introduction: Work-related musculoskeletal disorders are common in the healthcare sector due to physical demanding work tasks. Risk assessment is one cornerstone for preventing of injuries and promoting a safety culture. The TilThermometer has proved to be useful in the Netherlands for assessing healthcare workers’ physical exposure and is part of the CEN ISO TR 12296-2013 Ergonomics – Manual Handling of People in the Healthcare sector. The aim of this study was to translate the risk assessment instrument TilThermometer from Dutch to Swedish, evaluate its linguistic validity and perform a cross-cultural adaptation for a Swedish healthcare context.

Material and Methods: The translation and cross-cultural adaptation followed a structured process containing eight steps: 1) Translation, 2) Synthesis, 3) Back-translation, 4) Synthesis, 5) Linguistic review, 6) Expert panel review according to Delphi-method and 8) Semi-structured interviews, using qualitative content analysis.

Results: This process resulted in a Swedish version of the risk assessment instrument TilThermometer and assured linguistic validity and cross-cultural adaptation to a Swedish context. Consensus was reached in the expert review after two Delphi rounds. Interviews emerged into: 1) “User-friendly and understandable instrument”, 2) “Further development”, and 3) “Important part of the systematic work-environment management”.

Conclusion: The Swedish TilThermometer is now ready to be tested in the Swedish healthcare sector. Next phase is to continue further testing the psychometrics aspects, inter-rater reliability and feasibility of TilThermometer.