The act of measurement is an essential component of health sciences, to quantify severity of disease, blood biochemistry or response to treatment. Objective measures such as these are relatively easy to evaluate. However in areas of health science where subjective assessment is required, the fallibility of human judgement is a confounder e.g. pain scores, quality of life or elements of clinical assessment. Efforts to standardise these ‘tests’ so the meaning is universally understood has led to the development of scoring tools.

Development of scoring tools is not always conducted in a rigorous manner, leading to mis-application of measures, or unfounded reliance on the findings.

This session will provide an overview of approaches to critically evaluate the effectiveness and validity of scoring tools used in paediatric healthcare.