Hi Maxine
I hope you get lots of suggestions of specific measures to steer you. The
Patient Generated Index is one to check out. However, being told of measures
may not necessarily solve your problem in the long term.
Can I suggest you consider several questions before trying to find a measure?
1. Decide why you are wanting to evaluate your practice:
what is the purpose?
who is the information for?
what will you do with the information you collect?
2. What is the aim of your service, or more specifically, the intervention
with a patient?
3. What level of information do you therefore need to collect (this is akin
to the answer Anna Lee gave you)
- this might be impairments, 'disability' type info (functional levels),
or handicap
4. When you've considered these questions, you can then start to look for
outcome measures more constructively. If you jump in beforehand, you'll
probably find you don't like any of the measures you find, or that people
suggest to you.
5. There are many listings of outcome measures available nowadays. The
Chartered Society of Physiotherapy (CSP) has a database of information on its
web site, www.csp.org.uk. Go to the 'media centre'. On this web site, is a
'bibliography' of other books and papers which will help you. It will also
update you as to the work of the CSP on this subject.
6. Once you've found some measures you will then need to appraise them to see
if it suits your needs - this is the stage people frequently skip, or get
stuck with.
A paper by Greenhalgh, et al (1998) is very helpful with this: Reviewing and
selecting outcome measures for use in routine practice Journal of Evaluation
in Clinical Practice, 4, 4, 339 - 350.
7. The CSP is just about to publish a paper on finding and selecting measures
which goes through this process in a little more depth. It's free (!!) from
the Professional Affairs department - it will be announced in Frontline in
the next week or two.
I hope this is a helpful response, and not too detailed. There are many
measures to use, but no quick fixes: just like everything else we do with our
patients we need to consider the subject carefully.
Best wishes
Ralph Hammond
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