The Functional Mobility Scale (FMS)

TLDR

The study introduces the Functional Mobility Scale (FMS) to assess mobility in children with cerebral palsy and facilitate communication among clinicians. The FMS scores mobility across three distances—home, school, and community—and its construct, content, and concurrent validity were evaluated in 310 children by comparison with existing scales and instrumented physical function measures. The FMS proved valid, reliable, discriminative across disability levels, and sensitive to change after operative intervention in a consecutive cohort of 310 children.

Abstract

We devised a new Functional Mobility Scale (FMS) to describe functional mobility in children with cerebral palsy, as an aid to communication between orthopaedic surgeons and health professionals. The unique feature of the FMS is the freedom to score functional mobility over three distinct distances, chosen to represent mobility in the home, at school and in the wider community. We examined the construct, content, and concurrent validity of the FMS in a cohort of 310 children with cerebral palsy by comparing the FMS to existing scales and to instrumented measures of physical function. We demonstrated the scale to be both valid and reliable in a consecutive population sample of 310 children with cerebral palsy seen in our tertiary referral center. The FMS was useful for discriminating between large groups of children with varying levels of disabilities and functional mobility and sensitive to detect change after operative intervention.