Is the British Army medical grading functional assessment tool effective?

Decision Support Aids (DSAs) have been widely used throughout industry and one (known as Table 7) is available to support British Army Medical Officers (MOs) grade soldiers against the Joint Medical Employment Standards. It is unknown how useful this DSA is in practice. An electronic questionnaire was distributed to British Army MOs working within Defence Primary Care facilities enquiring about MOs views on the usefulness of the DSA. Although the response rate was low, informative data were obtained. Between a half and a third of respondents felt that their judgement was affected in the application of the grading system when there were career implications to the grading MOs felt that the DSA allowed subjectivity in the grading. The results of this research suggest that although minor changes to Table 7 may improve service provision, an improvement in training in the application of Table 7 would be of greater benefit to the quality of occupational health service provision in the British Army.