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There are many important elements that are needed for a screening tool to be effective:

•It needs to ask about relevant psychosocial constructs — such as beliefs, fears, expectations, concerns and behaviours known to be predictive of delayed recovery from injury and that are amenable to change.

•It needs to be sensitive3 and reliably capture a broad spectrum of psychosocial factors that might affect recovery. Reasonably high sensitivity ensures that the tools are more likely to over-include than to exclude potential cases of prolonged disability.  

•The questionnaire should be scored in a way that triage to the next step is as simple as possible (e.g., using a cut-off score for high vs low risk

•Screening questionnaires should be as brief as possible to avoid being an unreasonable burden to the respondent. But if too brief they may miss important information by not asking for it. It is essential that a screening questionnaire has been adequately tested in practice and its psychometric properties (reliability and validity) established in populations relevant to its intended use (e.g., injured workers).

•Screening questionnaires should be formatted so they can be easily used in different settings. While many people can complete questionnaires online, a telephone option or hard copy version should be available so that people with low literacy or language problems can be guided in their responses by a trained administrator.