Introduction:

The assessment of care has become a quality indicator in the nursing practice, however, due to the few instruments which consider the perspective of nurses, not only that of the user, and in order to improve the quality of care, it is important to rely on a tool which assesses the perceived caring behaviors that nurses provide within the clinical practice.

Objective:

To validate and adequate the version in Spanish of the Caring Behaviors Assessment in order to establish a first draft which can be used to assess the provided caring behaviors of a population of Mexican nurses at a hospital of second level of attention.

Methodology:

This is a study with descriptive, transversal, and process design, which uses sampling by convenience. The sample included 83 Mexican nurses.

Results:

The content validity index turned out to be 0.96. The coefficient in the general scale was α = .96, and those of the sub-scales ranged from .75 to .86 respectively. The analysis of factors indicated a 72% of the total variance explained by the first factor.

Conclusion:

The first version of the adapted instrument showed acceptable validity and consistency, and therefore was considered a useful tool for the assessment of perceived provided nursing care, which can contribute to the improvement of the standards of health services from the humanistic point of view.