Functional Status Questionnaire

What is the Functional Status Questionnaire (FSQ)?

The FSQ is a functional status assessment developed by researchers from the Beth Israel Hospital in Boston and the University of California in Los Angeles. It serves as a screening tool for possible disabilities that a person may have about their functional abilities and a monitoring tool to track any changes in the patient over time.

This comprehensive and feasible assessment tool zooms into certain aspects of a person to comprehensively evaluate them. It asks about their physical, psychological, and social/role functions. The answers for these are set, and the scores for each answer have been assigned, so the patient only needs to pick which answer best applies to them. The context of this questionnaire is based on how the patient was for the last month or the last thirty-one days.

This questionnaire also comes with single-item questions that ask the client how they feel about their health in general, whether they were bedridden because of an illness or injury, had to limit what they did in a day because of a disease or injury, what their work situation is, whether they are satisfied with their sex life, and how often they get together with family and friends.

This questionnaire targets older adults, elderly patients, stroke patients, multiple sclerosis patients, and patients with other ailments affecting their functional capacity and status. It's a valuable tool for mental health, physical, and occupational therapists, as well as primary care physicians treating those with suspected or confirmed functional status problems.

How to use the Functional Status Questionnaire

To incorporate this assessment into your practice, you only need to follow these steps:

Step 1: Download the FSQ template

From this guide, you can choose to "Use template" and access it through the Carepatron platform. You can also select "Download" to get a fillable PDF copy of this FSQ questionnaire.

Step 2: Issue the questionnaire to your patient

You can issue this functional status assessment in two ways:

As a sort of interview:

You can ask them the sets of questions mentioned in the tool, then provide them with the answer sets for each, and last, have them pick which answer best applies to them for each question. This is the best choice if their ability to write has been negatively impacted.

Hand this to them and have them answer on their own:

This is the easiest and most usual way to administer the Functional Status Questionnaire. This screening tool is technically a self-administered functional status assessment. If you opt for this choice, you can do so by having them answer on the spot or as something to take home. If they decide to take it home, agree on when you should receive it.

Step 3: Have the patient answer the following sections:

Whichever option you go for, they need to answer the following categories:

1. Physical function (basic activities of daily living, intermediate activities of daily living)
2. Psychological function (mental health)
3. Social/role function (work performance, social activity, quality of social interactions)
4. A set of single-item questions about miscellaneous information, such as their employment status, illnesses/injuries keeping them in bend if any, satisfaction with sex life, how they generally feel about their health, and how often they interact with the people in their life.

Each section has specific answer sets. Please refer to the template to see each one.

How do you score the Functional Status Questionnaire?

For your benefit, we wrote the possible answer sets for each question and indicated assigned scores for each answer. And, if you noticed, some of the questions have asterisks on them. For those specific questions, the scoring will be done in reverse.

Now, to score it, you'll have to follow this equation for each section:

1. Scale score = (added scores per question) - (number of questions in the section) / (number of questions in the section).

2. Scale score x 100 / (number of questions in the section) = (the total score for the section)

To give you a better picture, we'll give you an example. For this one, we are looking at the Basic ADLs section, which has three questions. Let's say they got the highest score possible for each question. The calculation for this would be:

1. (4+4+4) - 3 / 3 = 3 (Scale score)

2. 3 x 100 / 3 = 100 (total score for the Basic ADLs section)

Here's another example, but this time, without the highest scores possible:

1. (2+3+2) - 3 / 3 = 1.33 (Scale score)

2. 1.33 x 100 / 3 = 44.33 (total score for the Basic ADLs section)

It looks complicated, but follow those equations, and you should be fine!

Once you have calculated the scores for each category, you may refer to this scoring interpretation table below:

• If your patient has a score for the warning zone of a particular category, then that problem needs to be investigated further. You might need to conduct comprehensive assessments using other types of assessments to obtain more information from the patient and cover more ground.
• If you are wondering why the last set of questions isn't included, they are more for your reference. Their answers might help you determine more points for evaluating and investigating potential further functional decline.

What are the benefits of using the Functional Status Questionnaire?

Now that you understand how to use the FSQ, let's explore the benefits of this preformatted template.

It's an excellent way to get a general picture of a patient.

No patient is the same. Some might have problems with all categories in the questionnaire, while others might only have one. This functional status assessment will help healthcare professionals pinpoint what aspects of a patient's life have been impacted by an illness or disease and then determine what particular examinations need to be conducted on the patient to get more information that will eventually lead to developing a tailor-fitted treatment plan.

It can be used to monitor patients' functional status.

While this is primarily a screening tool, the Functional Status Questionnaire can later be used as a monitoring tool. Let's say that a treatment plan was created for the patient, and they followed it. This treatment plan covers all the categories indicated in the questionnaire. You can use this to track if the patient is getting better or worse as they follow their treatment plan or after it ends.

It can also be used to evaluate treatment plans.

The Functional Status Questionnaire can also be used to evaluate treatment plans. If patients improve based on their new questionnaire scores, that's a good indicator that the treatment plan is working and should be maintained.

If they show no signs of improvement or their scores are getting lower, they are not exactly getting better. This might mean that some parts of the treatment plan or the whole plan are not working, so something should be tweaked, or the entire thing must be overhauled.