An evaluation of the inter-rater and intra-rater reliability of OccuPro's functional capacity evaluation.
Carrie Scheel, Jim Mecham, Vic Zuccarello and 1 others
PMID 30040785WHAT IT FOUND
Trained examiners showed moderate to excellent agreement on OccuPro FCE subtests.
Pinch agreement was moderate in injured upper-extremity patients, and material-handling agreement between different examiners was moderate to good in healthy students.
Key findings
01In study one, 20 subjects completed three sessions, and upper-extremity subtest ICCs ranged from 0.656 to 0.931; pinch was 0.656.
02In study two, same-rater material-handling ICCs ranged from 0.85 to 0.97, which the paper called good to excellent intra-rater reliability.
03In study three, different-rater material-handling ICCs ranged from 0.66 to 0.86, which the paper called moderate to good inter-rater reliability.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for PTsWhat it means for OTs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
Study one recruited 27 participants, but only 20 completed all three sessions. The pinch and fine-motor decision directions were ambiguous, especially for pain ratings, and raters scored examinees differently. Studies two and three used healthy university students recruited by convenience sampling, not injured workers. Students reported soreness after the first material-handling session and said they did not want to lift as much during the second session. The three studies measured different variables. They were not combined into one larger analysis. The student raters were trained by the OccuPro FCE developer.
Declared interests
The authors reported no conflicts of interest. The developer of the OccuPro FCE methodology provided standard FCE performance training to the student raters.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the ICC values as proof that the OccuPro FCE makes correct return-to-work decisions. The paper reports rater consistency, and the material-handling reliability studies used healthy university students rather than injured workers.