Nursing and Clinical Evaluation in Spinal Cord Injury

This chapter aims to describe and evaluate the assessment tools for evaluating nursing and clinical aspects for people with SCI through a systematic review of scientific literature. The systematic review was conducted in line with COnsensus-based Standards for the selection of health Measurement Instruments (COSMIN) on PubMed, Scopus, CINAHL, and Web of Science. After removing duplicates, 3333 papers were screened. Of these, 476 were included in this systematic review. Among these, 55 papers were considered for this chapter. Results show 40 assessment tools that evaluate nursing and clinical aspects in persons with SCI. Among the 40 tools included in this chapter, most scales evaluate fatigue, skin management, bowel dysfunction, and pain. The most common assessment tools are the Spinal Cord Injury Pressure Ulcers Scale (SCIPUS) which is a 15-item risk assessment scale created to specifically evaluate the risk of pressure ulcer development, the Neurogenic Bowel Dysfunction (NBD) score which is a symptom-based score that evaluates the severity of colorectal dysfunction clinically, and the Brief Pain Inventory (BPI), which measures both pain intensity and pain interference with different domains of the life.