Development and validation of the Paediatric Care and Needs Scale (PCANS) for assessing support needs of children and youth with acquired brain injury

Abstract

These findings provide preliminary evidence for the validity of the PCANS for assessing support needs after paediatric ABI.

Assessing Care and Support Needs for Children With Acquired Brain Injury: Normative Data for the Paediatric Care and Needs Scale (PCANS)

“…Support for concurrent validity was found with statistically significant and moderately high correlation coefficients between the PCANS support intensity scores and the VABS (r s = -.66 to -.77), WeeFIM (r s = -.46 to -.69) and KOSCHI (r s = -.63). In terms of discriminant validity, PCANS scores distinguished between subgroups dichotomotised by VABS and KOSCHI data (Soo et al, 2008). The above findings provide preliminary evidence for the validity of the PCANS.…”

“…The Paediatric Care and Needs Scale (PCANS; Soo, Tate, Williams, Waddingham, & Waugh, 2008) was designed to measure support needs in everyday activities of children with ABI. The PCANS was adapted from the Care and Needs Scale (CANS; Tate, 2004), which was designed for adults with TBI.…”

“…Selection of the activities was based on clinical judgment by a multidisciplinary research team with clinical expertise in childhood brain injury rehabilitation, along with review of scales currently used for assessment of childhood outcome. Detailed description of the development of the PCANS can be found in Soo et al (2008).…”

“…An initial study of the validity of the PCANS yielded promising results (Soo et al, 2008). In that study, the PCANS was examined in 32 children and adolescents with ABI, aged 5 to 18 years, with the sample comprising children with severe (62.5%), moderate (16.7%), and mild (20.8%) injury, where severity information was available.…”

Practitioner Review: Beyond shaken baby syndrome: what influences the outcomes for infants following traumatic brain injury?

“…For example, the Vineland Adaptive Behaviour Scales (Sparrow, Balla, & Cicchetti, 1984) can be used from 0 to 18 years, but poor inter‐rater reliability limits its use in tracking progress over time if different people complete the assessment (Voelker, Shore, Hakim‐Larson, & Bruner, 1997). Functional assessment tools are now being developed with a focus on support needs (Soo, Tate, Williams, Waddingham, & Waugh, 2008) and using naturalistic tasks to enable systematic observation of skills (Chevignard et al, 2009).…”