We recommend rounding the CORE-OM cut-off score to 10. However, cut-off scores must be used thoughtfully and adjusted to fit context and purpose.

The CORE-OM and CORE-A are suitable assessment tools that show small but logical differences between psychological therapy services in primary- and secondary-based care.

Results for these three treatment approaches as practised routinely across a range of NHS settings were generally consistent with previous findings that theoretically different approaches tend to have equivalent outcomes. Caution is warranted because of limited treatment specification, non-random assignment, lack of a control group, missing data and other issues.

Background: There is a need for a user-friendly measure of change for use in school and youth counselling services which is easy for practitioners to administer and score, and which is appropriate for brief interventions. Aims: To develop such a measure and to present psychometric data on reliability, validity and sensitivity to change for the measure. Method: We employed a three-stage approach: first, creating a pool of potential items; second, developing an 18-item version; and third, refining to a final version comprising 10 items. We called the measure the Young Person's CORE (YP-CORE). Results: The measure comprised eight negative and two positive items and included a single (negatively-framed) risk-to-self item. Psychometric properties were all acceptable. Sensitivity to change was good and yielded an average improvement of 10 points on the YP-CORE in a clinical group, broadly equivalent to changes in adult versions (e.g. Clinical Outcomes in Routine Evaluation Á Outcome Measure (CORE-OM)). Conclusion: Initial validation work showed the measure to be well designed and sensitive to change. Analysis showed considerable variability as a function of age and gender suggesting the need for the collection of a large and diverse data set in order to produce gender and age-specific norms.

Background Many outcome measures for young people exist, but the choices for services are limited when seeking measures that (a) are free to use in both paper and electronic format, and (b) have evidence of good psychometric properties. Method Data on the Young Person's Clinical Outcomes in Routine Evaluation (YP‐CORE), completed by young people aged 11–16, are reported for a clinical sample (N = 1269) drawn from seven services and a nonclinical sample (N = 380). Analyses report item omission, reliability, referential distributions and sensitivity to change. Results The YP‐CORE had a very low rate of missing items, with 95.6% of forms at preintervention fully completed. The overall alpha was .80, with the values for all four subsamples (11–13 and 14–16 by gender) exceeding .70. There were significant differences in mean YP‐CORE scores by gender and age band, as well as distinct reliable change indices and clinically significant change cut‐off points. Conclusions These findings suggest that the YP‐CORE satisfies standard psychometric requirements for use as a routine outcome measure for young people. Its status as a free to use measure and the availability of an increasing number of translations makes the YP‐CORE a candidate outcome measure to be considered for routine services.

Outcomes of completed treatments for depression in randomized trials appeared to be modestly greater than those in routine care settings. The size of the difference may be distorted depending on the method for calculating degree of change. Transforming BDI scores into CORE-OM scores and vice versa may be a preferable alternative to effect sizes for comparisons of studies using these measures.

Clients (N = 77) undergoing cognitive therapy for depression were assessed before treatment with the Clinical Outcomes in Routine Evaluation—Outcome Measure (CORE-OM), which encompasses domains of subjective well-being, problems, functioning, and risk of harming self or others, along with the Beck Depression Inventory—II (BDI-II), the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression (HRSD), the Beck Hopelessness Scale (BHS), and a measure of avoidant (Cluster C) personality problems (Inventory of Interpersonal Problems—Avoidant [IIP-Av]). The CORE-OM and the BDI-II were strongly correlated with each other and showed coherent and similar patterns of correlations with the HRSD, the BHS, and the IIP-Av. Sixty-one of the clients were repeatedly assessed during treatment with alternating versions of the CORE Short Form and with the BDI-II. Results strongly supported the convergent validity of the CORE measures with the BDI-II in across-clients comparisons of means scores and rates of improvement and in across-sessions comparisons within clients.

There is a need to extend and test the feasibility and acceptability of mental health outcome measures in the older population (i.e., aged 65-100). We present data on the CORE-OM (Clinical Outcomes in Routine Evaluation-Outcome Measure) on a sample of 118 people aged 65-97 presenting for mental health treatment and 214 people aged 65-94 drawn from a non-clinical population. Results show the CORE-OM to be a reliable measure in both samples when the overall mean item is used but the reliability is not as high for the specific domains as psychometrically stable structures. The CORE-OM showed large overall differences between the non-clinical and clinical samples indicating that it is equally as sensitive to these differing populations across this older age band as with working-age adults. However, the norms for the clinical sample were consistently lower than the equivalent clinical norms for a working-age sample. These findings suggest that the collection and compilation of age-specific norms is crucial in ensuring that appropriately referenced norms are used rather than assuming that norms are generalizable across the whole adult life-span.