Generic health status measures are designed to broadly assess the concepts of health, disability, and quality of life. Although generic health status measures are often less responsive to changes in specific conditions than disease-specific instruments, they are important for broad comparisons of the relative impact of different conditions or treatments on the health of the population. The shor...

OBJECTIVE Investigators within many disciplines are using measures of well-being, but it is not always clear what they are measuring, or which instruments may best meet their objectives. The aims of this review were to: systematically identify well-being instruments, explore the variety of well-being dimensions within instruments and describe how the production of instruments has developed over...

automated clinical instruments that correlate cell volume and impedance (Coulter principle) with other measures such as light scatter and patterns of cellular staining. Evaluations using automated clinical instruments can accurately analyze and report on many samples per hour. The principal limitation of the automated approach is its difficulty in handling samples with atypical profiles. Such s...

Rheumatologists and other interested professionals at the OMERACT II conference formed small groups to discuss whether it was sensible to use a generic health status instrument in musculoskeletal disease trials. These instruments promise the possibility of comparison of health status between disease states. However, data is lacking on validity of the current generation of instruments to support...

PURPOSE The authors critically examined the quantitative measures of cultural competence most commonly used in medicine and in the health professions, to identify underlying assumptions about what constitutes competent practice across social and cultural diversity. METHOD A systematic review of approximately 20 years of literature listed in PubMed, the Cumulative Index of Nursing and Allied H...

BACKGROUND Care coordination has increasingly been recognized as an important aspect of high-quality health care delivery. Robust measures of coordination processes will be essential tools to evaluate, guide and support efforts to understand and improve coordination, yet little agreement exists among stakeholders about how to best measure care coordination. We aimed to review and characterize e...

BACKGROUND In many countries, the need for physical therapists to use standardised measures has been recognised and is recommended in clinical practice guidelines. Research has shown a lack of clinimetric knowledge and clinical application of measurement instruments in daily practice may hamper implementation of these guidelines. OBJECTIVES The aims of our study were a) to investigate the cur...

Objective: Pain is one of the most important outcomes in RA. Therefore, as objective as possible assessment of pain is necessary for reliable clinical evaluation and effective treatment planning. The purpose of the present study was to evaluate three pain measures in the sample of 151 newly-diagnosed RA-patients. More specifically, this study evaluates the construct validity of pain instruments...