1 Before you use it
What it is
A yellow-flag screen in ten items — the short form of the Örebro Musculoskeletal Pain Screening Questionnaire.
Covers pain, function, distress, fear-avoidance and expectation of recovery, and is aimed at predicting prolonged disability and failure to return to work, not at diagnosing anything.
When to reach for it
Early — first or second session — in any presentation at risk of becoming persistent. Low back pain, neck pain and whiplash above all.
Re-screen if the trajectory flattens. A patient who is not improving at six weeks has a reason, and this is one of the places to look.
2 Giving it
Scoring
Ten items summed to 0–100. Some items are reverse-scored — check before you total it, which is the most common error with this instrument.
What it doesn’t measure
It doesn't diagnose depression, anxiety or any psychological condition, and it is not a mental-health assessment. It is a risk screen for disability, and treating it as anything more is outside a student's scope.
Pair it with PSEQ if self-efficacy looks like the driver, and refer appropriately if distress is the finding rather than the risk.
Repeat it
3 Reading the score
Interpreting it
Higher scores indicate greater risk of a poor outcome. **A cut-point around 50 is commonly used.
The individual items are more useful than the total. A patient with a moderate total driven entirely by expectation of return to work is a different clinical problem from one driven by pain intensity, and the total hides that.
Is the change real?
On placement
Low back pain, second episode this year. OMPSQ-SF 58 at intake — the two items that drove it were 'expect to be back at work' and 'pain will persist'. Six weeks later, 47.
Read it as 11 points down, over the 6.4-point MDC and the 9-point anchor-based MCID, under the 12-point distribution-based figure (measured in musculoskeletal pain in primary care). And it is still near the conventional cut-point of 50. But the total was never the point — check whether the two work-expectation items are the ones that moved.
Do if the work items moved, the plan is working; if only pain intensity moved, the risk hasn't changed. Reverse-scored items checked before you totalled it, both times.
Student trap. Totalling it without reversing the reverse-scored items, then acting on a number that's wrong in the wrong direction.
Official source: maic.qld.gov.au. We don't host the form.
This is a learning tool. It does not diagnose patients and does not replace your clinical educator.
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