As part of a study investigating the relation between elderly patients' cognitive level and occupational therapy improvement, a method for assessing dressing skills was devised. The article describes this method of assessing dressing skills in elderly patients during the first dressing session of occupational therapy. The scoring of behaviour is based on a principle of minimum prompting, whereby greater credit is given for unprompted behaviour than for dressing after verbal or physical prompts. The method has high inter-rater reliability and correlates with a global performance test of activities of daily living.
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