Evaluation of the routine clinical use of the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale (BPRS) and the Abnormal Involuntary Movement Scale (AIMS).

OBJECTIVE

To evaluate the routine clinical use of the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale (BPRS) (in psychiatrists' monthly notes) and the Abnormal Involuntary Movement Scale (AIMS) (done at admission and annually) in a state hospital.

METHODS

Two residents and a medical student were trained in the use of the BPRS and the AIMS. These "key raters" then rated 21 patients before and 28 patients after the ward psychiatrists had one retraining session on the BPRS. These raters' results were compared with the ward psychiatrists' results before and after the BPRS retraining as well as with the ward psychiatrists' annual AIMS ratings.

RESULTS

The key raters had high correlations among themselves (0.85 for total BPRS and a mean of 0.83 for individual BPRS items), but the correlations with the ward psychiatrists' ratings were very low (0.17 for total BPRS and a mean of 0.37 for individual BPRS items), and those correlations improved only slightly after the retraining of the ward psychiatrists (0.33 for total BPRS and a mean of 0.41 for individual BPRS items). Ward psychiatrists both missed tardive dyskinesia and labelled parkinsonism as tardive dyskinesia.

CONCLUSIONS

The BPRS and AIMS are useful, practical rating scales, but if they are to be used routinely in clinical care, users must be regularly trained and retrained and rating performance evaluated. (Journal of Psychiatric Practice 2011;17:300-303).