Oswestry Disability Index
The Oswestry Disability Index was made to assess how a person with lower back pain is able to function in terms of activities of daily living. Use this for your practice when you work on rehabilitating your patient!
Fact Checked by Ericka Pingol.
What is the Oswestry Disability Index?
The (also known as the Oswestry Low Back Pain Disability Questionnaire) is a ten-section questionnaire that was created in order to help specific doctors to gauge how a person who has lower back pain is able to perform when it comes to certain activities of daily living, especially while going through rehabilitation.
The sections themselves are the activities of daily living, such as personal care, walking, sitting, standing, and even weight lifting! Each section has a set of six items that are statements of how lower back pain is affecting the patient. Do they not feel any pain at all when doing a particular activity? Are they still able to do that particular activity but feel a bit of pain doing so? Or does the pain prevent them from doing that activity at all? These are the general questions that will be answered by engaging with the ten sections of this index.
Printable Oswestry Disability Index
Download this Oswestry Disability Index and evaluate the functionality of patients with lower back pain.
How to use the Oswestry Disability Index
Have your patient answer the questionnaire!
The Oswestry Disability Index is simple and straightforward so you, the healthcare practitioner, don’t have to worry about anything complicated. All you need to do is explain what this index is all about then have your patient answer it!
The patient needs to look at the sections and tick the appropriate statement that applies to them. Do note that they can only pick one statement per section.
Calculate the scores!
The scoring for this isn’t at all complicated. Even if you aren’t fond of numbers, that’s okay! That’s why we’re here.
Basically, each section has six items. They are arranged by severity. The first item signifies that there is no pain when they do the activity. The last item always signifies that they are unable to perform or engage in the activity because the pain completely prevents them from doing so.
Each section can score between 0 to 5 points. The first statement is always 0. The last statement is always 5.
To calculate the scores, just follow this equation: the total score ÷ the total possible score (always 50) x 100.
Here’s an example:
- The total score is 16.
- The total possible score is always 50.
- Then the equation is 16 ÷ 50 x 100 = 32.
- The final answer is always a percentage, so it’s 32% in this case
Easy, right?
Now, after calculating the scores, refer to this scoring range chart and their designations to help you interpret the scores:
Come up with a care plan for your patient.
Once you have calculated the total and determined which percentage range it falls under, you can proceed to formulate a care plan for your patient. Make sure to consider the specific answers they ticked for each section to help you determine the most important things that your care plan should address.
Oswestry Disability Index Example
Now that you know how the Oswestry Disability Index works, it’s time for you to see what it looks like. Here’s a filled-out Oswestry Disability Index sample.
If you feel like you want to use this for your practice, then you are in luck! We have a free and printable Oswestry Disability Index PDF that you may download. You may choose to print it or you can issue it to your client digitally because it’s editable!
Download this Oswestry Disability Index Example (Sample) here:
When does one usually use the Oswestry Disability Index?
If a person schedules an appointment with you about their lower back pain, it’s best to immediately issue this to them once you have met up, whether face-to-face or through a telehealth system. Lower back pain should be taken seriously and addressed as soon as possible given that this could hinder a person from doing activities of daily living.
This can also be used during a patient’s lower back rehabilitation program in order to assess them from time to time to get a sense of how they are progressing.
Who can use the Oswestry Disability Index?
The following healthcare practitioners can use the Oswestry Disability Index for their respective practices:
- Orthopaedic doctors
- Orthopaedic assistants
- Physical therapists
- Physiatrists
Even chiropractors can use this! So long as lower back pain is their specialty and they are certified experts on the matter, they can definitely use this.
Why use Carepatron for physical therapy software and clinical documentation?
Carepatron houses a wide variety of worksheets, assessments, surveys, and treatment plans. We also have numerous guides to show you how to use them, like this one about the Oswestry Disability Index!
If you need to add more to your roster of assessments, then by all means, explore our platform! You’re bound to find something that you might find beneficial for your work.
Another perk of using our platform is that you can store your documents in a HIPAA-compliant manner and dictate who can access them!
Let’s say you are using the Oswestry Disability Index for your work, and you have issued it numerous times. You can store those on our platform. You are essentially making a digital backup for fully-accomplished indexes and other documents.
Storing your documents will also make them easily accessible anytime, anywhere. You’ll be able to access all of the documents you have stored on our platform from a desktop, laptop, phone, or whatever mobile device you have! Let’s say you need to make a house call and use the Oswestry Disability Index, you can just whip it out from whatever device you have with you and have your patient answer it via the tickable checkboxes!
Convenience. Accessibility. Security. You get all three with Carepatron.
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Commonly asked questions
If they simply forgot to, just point it out and have them tick the answers. But if they refuse to answer one, you simply have to adjust the computation. The equation should look like this if they decide to not answer one question: the total score ÷ the total possible score (now 45 because they didn’t answer one section) x 100
It should look like this:
16 ÷ 45 x 100 = 35.5%
One of the sections is highly personal, which is the part about sexual activity. There have been quite a number of accomplished indexes where this particular section was skipped. You can’t really blame the patient if they don’t want to answer that. Of course, it’s highly recommended that they answer it. You should always keep their answers private to you and the patient.
It’s pretty much the same thing except that it doesn’t include the part about sexual activity. It was replaced with a section about work/homemaking. So, if your patient doesn’t want to answer the section about sexual activity, maybe you would like to use the modified version instead so you still get the full results.
