You want to use a person-centered care approach — working on meaningful goals and activities with the person you are treating — but it’s just SO. HARD. to know how to do that when all you have is a standardized score from the CLQT (see also: MOCA, WAB, RIPA, WJ-III, TEA, and on and on).

You’re not alone! It’s really hard to figure out a functional need when you’ve been focused on just getting those standardized scores. So what can we do about it? (*Practically. Realistically. We’re ALL on a time schedule here.)

Introducing: The Discovering Functional Needs Series. I’m blogging about real, practical tools so that you can feel at ease and prepared to treat with a person-centered approach from the get-go.

In case you missed it: Check out Setting-Specific Checklists (which is part of my Discovering Functional Needs Packet).

And this week we’re talking about: Person-Centered Outcomes

Person-Centered Outcomes (also known as PCO’s, and also sometimes called Patient-Reported Outcomes or PRO’s) are gaining popularity and value as our field – and the medical field in general – moves to a person-centered approach. We’re realizing that we aren’t really capturing how a person is feeling about how they are doing when we are using standardized testing alone. And that the person’s opinion on outcomes / satisfaction / confidence holds significant value.

Here’s where PCO’s come in. PCO’s are questionnaires or checklists that gather information about how the person feels about their outcomes. How does the person say they are doing? They can be scored (Bonus! They can be used in Goal-Setting to reflect improvement in the person’s outcomes / satisfaction / confidence), and many of the newer ones coming out are validated (ie: Research has been done to confirm that it’s measuring what it’s intended to measure).

Now, I’ve spent HOURS trying to round up PCO’s that:

1. Are Free! Many are not easy to find and then cost $$
2. Are Realistic! I’ve worked in a bunch of settings and know that for the regular medical SLP, we can’t do a 50-question PCO as part of our assessment.

So, it’s a small but growing list, and I’ve compiled these FOR FREE for you–Organized by diagnosis, with all the direct links to find.

If you are on my email list for the Person-Centered Assessment Series: You received this Cheat Sheet!

If you would like to receive the Person-Centered Outcomes Cheat Sheet, sign up here: I WANT THE PERSON-CENTERED OUTCOMES CHEAT SHEET.

I hope you have fun trying some PCO’s and seeing which ones work best for the population you treat – and that it’s a helpful tool in discovering a need that matters to the person you treat in speech therapy!