CORE-OM

Description

The CORE-OM consists of 34 items answered on a single five-level frequency scale about the respondent's state over the past week. It was developed in response to a UK Mental Health Foundation research funding call, requiring coverage of well-being, problems, functioning, and risk. These were considered content domains rather than separable latent variables; no neat population structure from factor analysis was anticipated.

Similar instruments or systems and complementary measures

The CORE system adopted a bottom-up philosophy, allowing practitioners and researchers free use of the instruments, with copyleft status to remove cost barriers and prevent non-comparable mutations. Similar initiatives launched around the same time include the Outcome Questionnaire 45 led by Michael Lambert in the USA and the ORS/SRS system by Scott D. Miller. It was expected that such core measures would be supplemented by problem-specific instruments like the Beck Depression Inventory, which may be too long or costly for routine service.

Online completion and coronavirus pandemic

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the CORE System Trust provided free fillable PDF forms, Microsoft Forms, Qualtrics, and LimeSurvey templates. An attempt to offer Google Forms was abandoned due to difficulties ensuring practitioners would not share data when copying forms. The Therapy Meets Numbers resource now offers COREbots for online completion. A survey using the CORE-OM examined pandemic impacts on university staff in Porto Alegre, Brazil, with further publications expected from that work and from studies using the CORE-10 in Ecuador and the GP-CORE in Greece.

Did You Know?

• Translations must follow the CORE System Trust's translation protocol to be legal under the Creative Commons licence.
• A 2021 paper describes working to the protocol to translate the YP-CORE into Arabic.
• Ifigenia Mavranezouli created the CORE-6D scoring, converting six items into a QALY score for health economic evaluation.