Identifying ethical conflicts contributes to improve healthcare quality. This study aimed to evaluate content validity and verify internal consistency of the Inventory of Ethical Problems in Primary Health Care. The instrument - a close and structured questionnaire - is a result of decades of researches on bioethics in primary health care. The article focuses on the last stage of validation. At the beginning of this stage the instrument had 41 items. It was applied to 237 professionals of 12 primary care centers at Grupo Hospitalar Conceição (Porto Alegre/RS). After the exploratory factor analysis, it resulted in six dimensions with high degree of reliability and consistency (KMO = 0.831, Bartlett p < 0.001; alpha 0.876), which explained 61.4 % of variance. At the end, the validated version of the instrument had 6 factors and 24 items. The instrument may contribute to researches in bioethics through the development of studies to recognize the most common ethical problems in primary care and to explore the influence of different contexts on ethical problems.
Validation studies; Ethics; Bioethics; Primary health care; Problem solving