FAQ: How do I interpret LD-CORE scores?

Page created 23/5/15, only cosmetic tweaks since (17/2/19).

Good question and one I’ve now had twice in fairly short succession (as of 23/5/15) so I’m making this an FAQ. 

It depends a lot on the context and rather more so for the LD-CORE probably than the CORE-OM.  At the moment there is no big body of referential clinical or non-clinical data from the LD-CORE so you have to interpret the scores without reference parameters.  That sounds a bad thing, and certainly I’d love to have some good referential datasets so we could refer individual LD-CORE scores to them.  Having said that, perhaps not having them protects against unthinking use of the scores and that may be more important for the LD-CORE than for the CORE-OM with “neuro-norm” people as diversity of clinical problems and services is probably much higher for people with LD than for “neuro-norms”. 

What you can certainly do is to compare total scores over time for any client and hope to see them come down.  You can also look at the responses on the risk items in the same way.  If you are embedding the LD-CORE within the clinical work then high risk item scores (relative to the possible highest, and indicating fairly frequent risk) should be explored with whatever steps are appropriate for that client.  I’d always start off by asking permission to discuss these a bit more and say they, and other things, suggest the person is in quite a lot of pain at the moment and that I hope together we can help that and that starts with really understanding a bit more.  I.e. I’d be going what for me would be “the usual clinical” route.  If possible, I’d be keen to have third party information. Any experienced clinician will have their own way of handling risk and scaling the level of problems and should integrate the LD-CORE into that rather than letting it (or any other instrument) damage good established ways of working.

That’s using the scores within clients.  The other way I’d want to use the scores if I were working with people with LD would be to set up a simple spreadsheet so I could look at scores across my clients, e.g. to get a sense of the spread of scores at first contact and to start to think about how the latest client’s score fits in that spread.  I’d want to something similar for the spread of scores at sensible points in the work (after a month, or three months: depends on the duration of your work) and I’d certainly want to look at scores at termination and at the spread of change from state to termination.

Ideally, I’d want to link that with other people working with similar clients or with scores from colleagues in the service.

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