Appraising the impact and effectiveness of our interventions and services, and how they are perceived by the people who access them, is an integral part of professional practice – this is why we use outcome measures.
Selecting n outcome measure to use can be difficult as the list to choose from is confusingly long and each vary in specificity and sensitivity. Thankfully a cross-disciplinary group of professional bodies has developed a checklist to help you decide which is right for you and your patients.
Key Questions to Ask When Selecting Outcome Measures: a checklist for AHPs
The checklist contains three sections:
- Initial considerations when selecting outcome measures – This helps to identify the outcome and how you will measure it.
- Acceptibility and utility -will help you know if the outcome measure you’ve chosen is easy to use and feasibile in clinical practice.
- Measurement properties – get a sense for the validity, reliability, specificity and sensitivity.
It is definity worth knowing this tool won’t tell you which outcome measures you should be thinking about using but instead whether or not the one you’ve chosen is a decent tool for what you are tyring to measure.
So if you are looking to find out which outcome measures to appraise make sure you check out the awesome resources we have on Physiopedia covering outcome measures right from what they are to a non-exhaustive list of different measures to use for your speciality.