Predicting trends of community participation after hospital discharge for younger adults after stroke.

Background: Community participation is an indicator of recovery for younger adults after stroke who generally have a greater need to return to society than do older adults. However, little is known about the trends of participation and their determinants in this population.

Objective: To explore the trends of community participation by younger (<65 years) adults with stroke in Taiwan after their hospital discharge and to identify predictors of these trends.

Development of an applied cognition scale to measure rehabilitation outcomes.

Objective: To examine the structure and content coverage of an item pool of new items based on the Activity categories from the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health and items from existing instruments to measure the applied cognition dimension of function.

Design: Prospective study.

Setting: Four postacute care rehabilitation settings (inpatient, transitional care, home care, outpatient) in an urban-suburban area of northeast United States.

Pediatric physical functioning reference curves.

We developed normative profiles of physical functioning (mobility and self-care) in infancy up through 14 years of age with an expanded version of the Pediatric Evaluation of Disability Inventory. Mobility and self-care reference curves were based on the original Pediatric Evaluation of Disability Inventory standardization data (n = 412) and data from an additional cross-sectional, convenience sample (n = 373) via web-based survey, telephone or in-person interviews of parents. This new sample, which included children up through 14 years-of-age, was stratified for race, age, and sex, but was primarily limited geographically to the Northeast region of the United States.

Refining the conceptual basis for rehabilitation outcome measurement: personal care and instrumental activities domain.

Background: Rehabilitation outcome measures routinely include content on performance of daily activities; however, the conceptual basis for item selection is rarely specified. These instruments differ significantly in format, number, and specificity of daily activity items and in the measurement dimensions and type of scale used to specify levels of performance. We propose that a requirement for upper limb and hand skills underlies many activities of daily living (ADL) and instrumental activities of daily living (IADL) items in current instruments, and that items selected based on this definition can be placed along a single functional continuum.

Is patient-reported function reliable for monitoring postacute outcomes?

Objective: A major challenge in the development of a comprehensive measurement system to evaluate effectiveness across a broad range of postacute care settings is the stability and consistency of outcomes measures across respondents and settings. The objective of this study was to investigate the test-retest and subject-proxy reliability of activity scores for use in a new postacute care outcome instrument using an interview format across different care settings.

Design: Twenty-five subjects were randomly selected from a larger study of 485 individuals and were interviewed on two occasions within 1 to 4 days to assess self-reported test-retest reliability of summary scores of the Activity Measure-Post-Acute Care item pool.