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Although the original launch of the CORE instruments included the two 18 item Short Forms (SF/A and SF/B), it became clear that a major shift was occurring in expectations of the length of measures. It also became clear that in routine practice practitioners were unlikely to want the challenge of found keeping track of which short form to use, week on week. As a result, we created a single shorter short form: the CORE-10. It has proved a very popular measure for sessional use in the UK and increasingly in other countries and languages.

The CORE-10 has no wellbeing items, six problem domain items, three functioning domain items and one risk item; given the small numbers of items, no domain scores are used from the CORE-10.  It can be prorated if only one item is omitted but clearly prorated scores should be interpreted cautiously as omission of any item from a short but broad coverage measure can affect the relationship of a prorated score to a score based on all the items.

Our recommendation is that practitioners should use the CORE-OM at baseline and then switch to the CORE-10 for sessions after that. That enables the computation of a CORE-6D “quality adjusted life year” (QuALY) score at baseline and gives a much broader picture of the baseline state of the client. Where the last session is planned, the CORE-OM should be used for a termination score and, ideally at follow-up sessions if those are routine. 

Reference

The key reference that introduced the CORE-10 with some UK psychometric exploration is:

Barkham, M., Bewick, B., Mullin, T., Gilbody, S., Connell, J., Cahill, J., Mellor-Clark, J., Richards, D., Unsworth, G. & Evans, C. (2012). The CORE-10: A short measure of psychological distress for routine use in the psychological therapies. Counselling and Psychotherapy Research, 1–11http://doi.org/10.1080/14733145.2012.729069.

Download

Download the English language PDF of the CORE-10 using link below, for other languages, go to the translations page.

English CORE-10 PDF

Depending on your web browser, clicking on that link will either open it, in which case you should be able to save it from there, or will offer to download it for you (or it may just download it to its default download location). Downloading means you accept the licence on the measure, see copyright and licensing information.

Versions

As of 14/2/22 I have replaced the original CORE-10 with CORE-10 v1.1. The only change is a small tweak to the scoring instructions in the light of feedback to make them clearer. They were:

Procedure: Add together the item scores, then divide by the number of questions completed to get the mean score,
then multiply by 10 to get the Clinical Score.
Quick method for the CORE-10 (if all items completed): Add together the item scores to get the Clinical Score.

Now:

*Quick scoring if all items completed: add together the item scores to get the Clinical Score.
It is not recommended to compute a score if more than one item was omitted but if nine were completed:
add together the item scores, divide by nine to get the mean score, then multiply by 10 to get the Clinical Score.

Created for original site 1/1/2015, last updated 14/2/22, author CE, licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) .

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