Pediatric Functional Evaluation Measure(PFEM): Development and Standardisation

The Pediatric Functional Evaluation Measure (PFEM) is a comprehensive tool to measure the functional capabilities and performance in children from the ages of 6 months to 6 years.

Background

Assessment of the functional limitations is important to determine the severity of disability in developmental delays and to evaluate the benefit of rehabilitation program. In India, one of the many challenges in assessing the effectiveness of therapies has been the paucity of validated measures of function.

Methods

The Pediatric Functional Evaluation Measure evaluates the functional abilities of children under three domains: Physical Function Domain, Mental Function Domain, and Social & Emotional Function Domain. Pooling of questions was done and content validity of the PFEM was examined using a panel of 35 experts. A pilot study was conducted on 110 normal children and 49 children with cerebral palsy.

Results

The content validity for the physical domain, mental domain and socio-emotional domain are 100%, 100%&98.7% respectively. The mean score for inter-rater reliability is .869. The mean values of the normal children in all the three domains are 69.42 which are far higher than the mean value of the children with cerebral palsy (14.054).

Conclusion

These results indicate that the Pediatric Functional Evaluation Measure has a high degree of reliability and validity and also support the notion that the PFEM can be used to assess the functional abilities in children with cerebral palsy.