Validity and reliability of the Winchester Disability Rating Scale (2). A comprehensive screening instrument for the elderly in the community.

Health and social services across the more developed countries in the world are facing the problem of providing care and support for an ever increasing elderly population. It has been suggested that this challenge would best be met by performing frequent 'assessment' of the total elderly population in a country. This would be very difficult and time consuming in a large country with a high number of elderly people. Screening using a broad coarse instrument aimed at identifying variations in dependency over time would be simpler, effective and more likely to be actually performed in the greatest majority of the target population. In developing firstly the Winchester Disability Rating Scale (WDRS) and then the WDRS-2, which includes a subscale for depression, we believe to have found an effective instrument to measure dependency and with it the means to limit hospitalization. We validated the WDRS-2 on a large sample of elderly people living in local authority housing schemes, and were able to demonstrate that our instrument has both high specificity and high sensitivity for the identification of depression in elderly people living in the community. This new instrument offers primary care physicians the opportunity to rapidly and successfully assess their elderly patients living in the community.