Bobath Foundation Scale: Assessment of Children and Adolescents with Cerebral Palsy
The Bobath Foundation Scale (BFS) is an assessment instrument specifically designed for the comprehensive and exhaustive evaluation of children and adolescents with Cerebral Palsy (CP). Its aim is to determine, in a structured and well-founded manner, the clinical manifestations resulting from brain damage and their impact on health, sensorimotor functioning, basic cognitive-social abilities, and adaptive processes across the different contexts of daily life.
Bobath Foundation Scale: Key Features
- It integrates physical, functional, and psychosocial dimensions, in line with a broad perspective of functioning and quality of life in individuals with CP.
- It provides numerical data reflecting both the overall level of impairment and the relative involvement of specific functions and abilities.
- It enables the establishment of an individualized profile for each child or adolescent, supporting the planning of therapeutic goals and the design of personalized intervention programs.
- It may be applied by professionals from different disciplines involved in childhood neurological disorders, facilitating interprofessional communication through shared assessment criteria, and promoting theoretical-practical knowledge of CP and other neurodevelopmental disorders.
- It has undergone a formal validation process, showing adequate indicators of validity and reliability, and its content has been documented with the scientific literature.
- In addition to clinical or care settings, it can be used in research contexts (single-case studies, longitudinal analyses, comparative studies of samples or groups, analyses of intervention effectiveness, etc.).
- It has been conceived for use in clinical, educational, teaching, and research contexts, independently of the intervention model applied or the theoretical-methodological framework of the professionals using it (it has no conceptual, methodological, or therapeutic dependence on the Bobath/NDT approach).
Bobath Foundation Scale: Structure
The TOTAL Scale consists of 50 items which are grouped into three subscales, each of which is related to a different aspect of the problems commonly occurring in cerebral palsy. In turn, the Subscales are subdivided into Areas that measure the impairment in specific aspects.
GENERAL CONDITION Subscale:
This collects information about the person’s medical history and the causes that may have produced the neurological damage; it also determines their state of health, taking into account the care or treatment required to maintain or improve their physical well-being and quality of life.
SENSORIMOTOR Subscale:
This focuses on the exploration of tonic-postural circumstances, gross motor skills, sensory abilities and perceptual organization through movement. The content of this subscale is clearly oriented towards examining the type and degree of bodily and physical impediment due to the neurological injury producing the cerebral palsy and its possible implications in functional activity.
SOCIAL-COGNITIVE Subscale:
This incorporates data on the repercussions that neurological damage and sensory-motor disorders have on acquisition of adaptive skills, as well as on basic intellectual development to function in the physical and social environment. It includes elementary cognitive aspects related to independence in the environment (autonomy in daily life, communication skills, behavioural management, social interaction, etc.).
subscales and areas
Physical Condition
- Medical history. Associated health problems. General physical status.
Quality of Life Needs
- Care requirements. Therapeutic and medical needs that influence well-being.
Neuromotor
- Bodily motor impairment. Postural control. Functional movement patterns; positional transfers; basic actions (gait, reaching, grasping).
Perceptual-Motor
- Sensory information and perceptual processing. Influence of sensory input on motor organization.
- Sensory-perceptual integration during movement.
Functional Autonomy
- Self-sufficiency in everyday activities (eating, washing, dressing, mobility in the environment); efficient use of objects.
Communication and Language
- Verbal/non-verbal communicative abilities. Receptive and expressive language skills.
Cognitive Competence
- Basic problem-solving; emotional regulation, social interaction skills, behavioral management.
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