McGill Ingestive Skills Assessment (MISA): Development and first field test of an evaluation of functional ingestive skills of elderly persons

There is a lack of reliable and valid clinical assessment tools for individuals with loss of ingestive skills. The McGill Ingestive Skills Assessment (MISA) was developed to facilitate the reliable and valid bedside assessment of elderly persons with feeding difficulties. Items were generated by a literature review and selected with the collaboration of a multidisciplinary team. The first version of the MISA comprised 190 items in 7 scales, covering the domains of medical history, mealtime environment, physical characteristics of the patient, food textures consumed, solid ingestion, liquid ingestion, and behaviors related to self-feeding. The first field test for item selection included 50 individuals, aged 60 years and older, living in the community, supervised housing, and long-term care centers. After field testing, 134 items were eliminated due to poor face validity, redundancy, or poor psychometric performance. The remaining 56 items were provided with 4 response categories and were reorganized into 5 scales. The revised version was field tested to determine its preliminary psychometric properties on 33 individuals, 60 years of age and older, residing in a long-term care center. Six items were eliminated due to redundancy after the second field test. Analyses of the revised version resulted in the elimination of another 6 items that were redundant or that demonstrated poor reliability. Internal consistency of all scales is greater than or equal to0.86 and interrater agreement is greater than or equal to0.92. These analyses suggest that the psychometric properties of the MISA are adequate for diagnosis and treatment planning. This supports its readiness for clinical use following further reliability and validity testing with a larger sample.