The development of a valid and easy to administer tool that accurately measures vitamin D consumption in children is important in order to assess factors that optimize vitamin D status in this vulnerable subgroup.
Cognitive impairment is common but often undiagnosed in patients with end-stage renal disease, in part reflecting limited validated and easily administered tools to assess cognitive function in dialysis patients.
Simple, cost-effective, and easy-to-administer tools are required in order to facilitate accurate monitoring of these patients.
Decision boards have been extensively tested in multiple medical fields including orthopedic surgery, and shown to be valid, reliable and easily administered tools [ 21, 31, 32].
The Sinhala version of PedsQL™ 4.0 Generic Core Scales was tested as self administered tools to school children aged 12 14 years and their parents.
The current trial utilized easily administered tools (spinal mobility, hip motion, symptom characteristics and a simple questionnaire) to attempt to characterize those patients who would respond to one type of treatment over another.
More recently, other types of studies have focused on the development of cognitive screening tools – scales that do not require additional materials in order to be administered, tools that have different interchangeable versions, tools that are simple and easy to administer, and have an administration time that is appropriate and manageable in clinical practice, i.e., approximately 15 minutes.
Since there is no gold standard global health status and therapist administered tools with which to compare AusTOMs, it was decided to compare the constructs of AusTOMs with those of EuroQoL-5D (EQ-5D) [ 22] in order to investigate the convergent validity of the tool [ 16].
However, as prosthesis design and the control of adverse events improved, these issues become less important, and attention turned towards clinician administered tools, such as the Harris Hip Score [ 9] and American Knee Society Score [ 10], and more recently towards patient reported outcome measures (PROMs) [ 11].
This could be attributed to the fact that this was a self administered tool and respondent were feeling pressured to give higher scores to avoid being rated low.
