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The CORE Outcome Measure (CORE-OM) is a self-report measure of psychological distress designed to be administered during a course of treatment to determine treatment response. The broad spectrum nature of the measure means it captures a wide variety of problems associated with mental health difficulties, beyond typical symptom measures. The copyright holder for the CORE-OM is the CORE System Trust.
The client is asked to respond to 34 questions about how they have been feeling over the last week, using a 5-point scale. The scale covers four dimensions:
When the questionnaire is administered periodically comparison of the pre-and post-therapy scores offers a robust measure of ‘outcome’ (i.e. whether or not the client’s level of distress has changed, and by how much).
Scores are presented as a total raw score (range 0-136) and a client average response from 0 – 4, which represents that average response on the likert scale and allows for standardised comparison across subscales. Higher scores represent poorer overall functioning.
In addition, scores are presented as a percentile compared to a clinical normative sample, where a percentile of 50 represents the average psychological distress of someone seeking psychological intervention.
Scores are presented for the 4 subscales.
When administered more than once two graphs are produced. The first shows the total clinical percentile over time, which compares respondents total score to other people seeking mental health support. The second graph represents subscale percentiles over time and is helpful for understanding the areas of improvement or deterioration and therefore targets for treatment. Both graphs can be useful in providing feedback to clients and assessing treatment response.
Since its development the CORE-OM has been validated with samples from the general population, NHS primary and secondary care, and in older adults.
Clinical normative data came from 21 sites from England, predominately within the NHS. The clinical population comprising users waiting for or receiving a wide variety of psychological interventions in a wide variety of settings (total n = 863). This normative data is reported in the Core System User Manual (Evans et al., 1998) and is used to compute percentile ranks.
The copyright holder for the CORE-OM is the CORE System Trust https://www.coresystemtrust.org.uk/home/instruments/core-om-information/
Evans, C., Mellor-Clark, J., Margison, F., Barkham, M., Audin, K., Connell, J., & McGrath, G. (2000). CORE: Clinical Outcomes in Routine Evaluation. Journal of Mental Health, 9(3), 247–255. http://doi.org/10.1080/jmh.9.3.247.255.
Evans, C., Mellor-Clark, J., Margison, F., Barkham, M., Audin, K., Connell, J., & McGrath, G. (2000). CORE: Clinical Outcomes in Routine Evaluation. Journal of Mental Health, 9(3), 247–255. http://doi.org/10.1080/jmh.9.3.247.255.
Evans, C., Connell, J., Barkham, M., Mellor-Clark, J., Margison, F., McGrath, G. & Audin, K. (1998). The CORE outcome measure: user’s manual (version 2.1). https://www.researchgate.net/publication/203827825_The_CORE_outcome_measure_user’s_manual_version_21
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