OCS

The Oxford Cognitive Screen is a stroke-specific cognitive screen.  The OCS was specifically designed to pick up domain-specific post-stroke cognitive problems early after stroke, including apraxia, neglect, aphasia, reading and writing impairments. It was designed to be inclusive for patients with aphasia, and reduces confounds from co-occurring language and neglect problems. A brief cognitive screen, which can be delivered at the bedside, taking max 20 minutes. It returns a visual snapshot of a patient’s cognitive profile which summarises performance across 5 cognitive domains.

The Oxford Cognitive Screen is now well known in the stroke clinical community, with >1100 licenced sites. The tool was developed in line with NICE guidelines which advised to “As soon as possible, … , perform a full medical assessment of the person with stroke, including cognition (attention, memory, spatial awareness, apraxia, perception)”. The tool is now part of the RCP clinical guidelines for stroke.

 

In order to help us keep track of the spread of use of this cognitive screen, the test materials are being licensed for use through Oxford University Innovation.  The test materials’ licensing agreement is free of charge for publicly funded clinical and research use, though charges will apply for use by commercial entities. The Oxford Cognitive Screen is now well known in the stroke clinical community, with >1100 licenced sites.

Please find more specifics on how to administer OCS, including a video on why the OCS was developed,  a demonstration video, a video on how to score each of the subtests and interpret the results,  and information on different language versions of OCS on www.ocs-test.org.

Ongoing OCS Research

Oxford Cognitive Screening Programme

Our group supports an ongoing cognitive screening programme of stroke patient research at the John Radcliffe acute stroke unit, recruiting approx. 120 patients annually since 2012. Patients are followed up at 6 months with a home-visit. The current active study is OCS-Recovery.

This ongoing programme has given rise to an existing and growing cohort of >900 consecutive acute stroke participants with acute OCS.  The data is used in a multitude of ways from improving diagnostics for clinical use, addressing the predictive ability of short screening tests for long term outcomes and using the data for lesion-symptom analysis based on clinical admission scans.

With a recent Stroke Association priority award, we are now contacting people from the OCS-Recovery study, who are now at least 2 years post stroke in the OX-CHRONIC study, in order to better understand long-term psychological consequences of stroke.

Translations

Several research studies following a standard translation and cultural adaptation protocol are ongoing with several also completed. Rather than only translating the OCS, each different language version is published with population specific normative data and cut offs for impairment.  Most translations further validate the tool against common instruments in local practice.  We work closely with the local research teams and provide support with materials and protocols.

If you are interested in translating and re-norming the OCS for your country, please get in touch with healthoutcomes@innovation.ox.ac.uk in the first place.

Current work is ongoing on German, Dutch, Norwegian, Lithuanian, Polish and Greek versions, with standardised and normed translations of OCS already out for: Italian, Cantonese, Mandarin, Russian, Danish, Spanish, Brazillian Portuguese

 

Related Projects