PSFS · Patient-Specific Functional Scale

The single most useful PROM a student can own, and the answer to "which questionnaire do I use for a rib contusion".

The patient names three activities they are having difficulty with, and rates each 0 to 10 — 0 is unable to perform, 10 is able to perform at the pre-injury level. It works on every body region and every pattern in this corpus, because the patient supplies the content.

Every patient, at the first session, before you examine them. Two minutes.

It doubles as goal-setting, it feeds the SOAP subjective, and it gives you a re-test that the patient actually cares about. On patterns with no region-specific PROM — the thoracic pages especially — it is the measure.

Score each activity 0–10; report each separately and as a mean. Re-rate the same activities at every review — the activities are the instrument.

Write the activities down verbatim. "Carrying the shopping from the car" is re-testable; "lifting" is not.

Pain intensity. Pair it with the NPRS.

And it doesn't compare between patients. Two people scoring 4/10 have nominated different activities, so the number is meaningful within a person and meaningless across a group. That is a feature clinically and a limitation in research.

Interpret against the patient's own baseline. A commonly cited threshold is about 2 points for an individual activity and about 1 point for the average.

The activities themselves are diagnostic information. A shoulder patient who nominates washing my hair and reaching the back seat has told you more about their pattern than a disability index score would.