Functional status questionnaires for spinal pain.

There is a relatively new functional status questionnaire, the Functional Rating Index (FRI), (Feise and Menke 2001) which overcomes these barriers to a large extent, yet has been largely unnoticed. In effect it is a hybrid instrument of the ODQ and NDI, consisting of 10 sections, with each item scored on a five-point scale. The key feature of the FRI is that it is a more clinician-friendly instrument, as it assesses both back and neck pain and requires only 78 seconds to be completed and scored. This compares with total administration times of 6 minutes for the ODQ (Davidson and Keating 2005) and 5–10 minutes for the NDQ (Sterling 2005).