Introduction:

hypertensive patients show difficulties to treatment adherence, which justifies the construction and validation of instruments to identify the barriers to this manifestation.

Objective:

to validate the General Guideline to diagnose barriers affecting therapeutic adherence in hypertensive patients, its content and application in the selected sample.

Methods:

theoretical integration methods were applied to guide the proposed questionnaire approach, which was developed to be used in focus groups. Content validation was done by expert assessment. The instrument was applied to a sample of 100 essential hypertensive people, 142 providers and 12 managers, from the three health areas of Remedios municipality.

Results:

the five dimensions were integrated as determinants of therapeutic adherence, with three dimensions of the social determination of health. This allowed giving an optimal structure to the questionnaire named: General Guideline. A diagnosis was obtained within the scenario of health action in the territory and the analysis was focused on the social actors. The coefficient of agreement between experts was 0.82, for the criteria: reasonable, comprehensible and sensitive to variation. The categories included in the instrument were shown to be appropriate. Barriers affecting therapeutic adherence in hypertensive people in the studied areas were obtained.

Conclusions:

the results of the content validation test carried out by the experts, as well as the results of the diagnosis, showed that the General Guide is a useful tool.