The Use of Standardised and Non-Standardised Assessments in a Social Services Setting: Implications for Practice

Abstract

The increasing demand for occupational therapists to justify their practice and their clinical judgements stimulated consideration of the importance of the psychometric properties of the tools used by professionals in making clinical judgements. In social services settings a variety of procedures are used to establish a client's entitlement to services, some of which are more rigorous than others. In this study, a non-standardised assessment tool to measure severity of disability was compared with a standardised tool to assesswhether there were differences in outcomes and what, if any, were the consequences for service entitlement. The conclusion was that the use of non-standardised tools may unfairly disadvantage some client groups when being assessedfor services.