Article

There is increasing emphasis on the need to identify, work with and evaluate
rehabilitation outcomes in ways that are personally relevant to individuals with
brain injury, whether this be at a global or individual client level. This paper
focuses on the use of one such method, Goal Attainment Scaling (GAS). It provides
a general review of GAS and discusses what we found to be the strengths and
limitations of using GAS to assess functional improvements in a rehabilitation
study. Strengths included enabling the measurement of goal accomplishment on
meaningful daily activities, capturing improvement on relevant functional tasks
more effectively than broad measures of impairment, and facilitating
collaborative goal-setting. Limitations included the time required to identify
goals that could be broken down into five GAS outcome levels and defining the
five levels, and compromised assessment of goal attainment due to poorly
constructed GAS scales. Recommendations for minimising these potential
limitations in future applications of GAS are also discussed. They include
setting GAS baseline levels consistently across all scales, assigning GAS weights
based on the client's ratings of importance, reviewing GAS weightings prior to
each measurement phase, and using a suggested checklist to minimise the
likelihood of poorly constructed scales.

Langue : ANGLAIS