Providing Functional Communication Test for Persian Patients and Determining Its Validity and Reliability

The International Classification of Impairment, Disabilities and Health by the World Health Organization had a profound influence on assessing and treating people with acquired brain injuries (ABI), which cause a movement from using impairment-based intervention to use therapies that focused on improving the participation and function of the individual's daily life. Although the first step of any therapy plan is to measure the damaged function of the related dimension, no available functional communication test for Persian-speaking people with ABI is available. Our purpose of this study was to provide a Functional Communication Test for Persian-speaking patients to measure the strengths and weakness of communication in dementia-free patients with ABI. In this cross-sectional study, the first version of the Persian Functional Communication Test (P-FUCT) was designed based on the structure of the most common functional communication tests such as ASHA-FACS and CADL. The content validity ratio (CVR) were determined. The final version of P-FUCT was administered on 30 dementia-free patients with ABI completed once by a clinician and once by the caregivers and the correlation between the scores was obtained. Concurrently, the P-WAB-1 was administered to assess the concurrent validity of the P-FUCT. The results indicated that P-FUCT has an acceptable level of internal consistency (alpha = 0.96), inter-rater 0.91 and intra-rater measurements 0.95 p < 0.05 with an adequate CVR of 0.71. The correlation between P-WAB-1 and P-FUCT scores completed by clinicians and the caregivers was r = 0/79 and r = 0/80. The P-FUCT is a valid and reliable assessment tool can be use for measuring the function communication ability of dementia-free patients with ABI.