Clinically useful scales must be reliable. High inter‐rater reliability reduces errors of measurement. The purpose of this study was to assess the agreement between raters in scoring items of the Westmead post‐traumatic amnesia (PTA) scale. Two raters viewed 20 episodes of the Westmead PTA scale in clinical use. The inter‐rater reliability coefficients for the instrument overall and for a majority of the individual items were statistically convincing (r ≥ 0.72) and well within clinically acceptable ranges. The lowest correlation was for the item pertaining to recognition of the examiner's face. A procedure for improving the reliability of scoring this item is recommended.
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Geffen et al. (1994) studied this question.
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