Footnote: aStataCorp 2012. www.stata.com eAddenda: Appendix 1 and 2 available at jop.physiotherapy.asn.au Competing interests: Terry P Haines has provided expert witness testimony in the area of falls in the hospital setting for Minter Ellison Lawyers. He has received payment for speaking at the Australia New Zealand Falls Prevention Conference. He has received payment for providing statistical and economic analyses for DorsaVi Pty Ltd. He is also the director of Hospital Falls Prevention Solutions

Pty Ltd. This company provides the Safe Recovery Training Program for the purpose of preventing falls in the hospital setting. We declare no further conflicts of interest. We thank Jenny Keating for the critical appraisal of this

manuscript. “
“The Berg Balance Scale was developed in 1989 via health professional and patient interviews that explored the various methods used to assess balance find more (Berg et al 1989). Initially, 38 balance tests were selected as potential components of the score and then refined through further interviews and trials to 14 items. Each of these items is scored from 0 to 4, which are summed to make a total score between 0 and 56, with a higher score indicating better balance. Although the Berg Balance Scale was originally developed to measure balance in the elderly, it has since been used to measure balance in a wide variety of patients. All clinical measurement EPZ-6438 clinical trial tools need to be reliable. Absolute reliability is clinically relevant and appears to be the most useful way of describing the reliability of the Berg Balance

Scale (Bland and Altman 1986). The absolute reliability of the Berg Balance Scale provides a confidence interval, within which one can be confident that a change in balance is real change. The most common way of expressing this is the minimal detectable change Urease with 95% confidence (MDC95). With regard to balance, intra-rater reliability refers to the reproducibility of a balance score when tested and retested by the same assessor. Inter-rater reliability refers to the reproducibility of a balance score when measured by different assessors. Relative reliability provides information about the variation in a score due to measurement error relative to variation within a population. This measure of reliability appears commonly in the literature, usually expressed as intra-class correlation (ICC) where a score of 1 represents perfect agreement and a score of 0 represents no relationship. Relative reliability provides perspective of the reliability of the Berg Balance Scale compared to other measurements, but is less useful clinically and is dependent on variability within the study sample. Studies of heterogeneous populations may find a very high relative reliability, even when the test is unable to detect clinically important changes reliably (Bland and Altman 1986).