Hip pain and function self-assessment

What the score measures

How much your hip is interfering with an ordinary day, over the last 48 hours, across three domains: pain, stiffness and daily function. Each item is rated from none to extreme, the answers are normalised to a 0 to 100 scale, and higher means more symptoms. The three domain scores are shown separately as well as the total, because a hip that is stiff but not especially painful is a different problem from one that hurts constantly and moves freely.

The function items are hip specific rather than generic. Putting on a sock, getting into a car, lying on the painful side at night and twisting on the leg are the movements a hip restricts first, and none of them appear on a knee questionnaire. That is why this is a separate assessment rather than the knee one with a word swapped.

This is not WOMAC or HOOS

The established hip instruments, WOMAC and HOOS, are validated, published and not ours to reprint. WOMAC in particular is licensed. So this assessment covers the same domains, in the same structure, on the same five point response scale, with item wording written for this site. That means the number it gives you is directly comparable with your own earlier scores here, and only roughly comparable with a score a clinic takes using the real instrument. If a formal score is needed, a clinician will administer the real one.

What the bands mean

Minimal and mild describe symptoms that show up in particular activities rather than across the day. Moderate is the point at which symptoms are shaping how you move through a normal day, and it is a reasonable trigger for a proper assessment if you have not had one. Severe and extreme are the ranges where surgical options are usually part of the conversation, though the score is nowhere near the whole picture: imaging, examination, your age, your other health conditions and what you actually want to be able to do all count for more than a questionnaire.

The most useful thing you can do with the number

Write it down with today's date, and do it again in three and six months. Symptom recall over months is genuinely poor, which is why the answer to "how has it been since I last saw you" is so often unreliable, and a dated pair of scores is not. A hip that has moved from 38 to 61 over two seasons is a clearer piece of information than any single reading, whatever you end up doing about it.

What this cannot do is tell you whether you have osteoarthritis, what is causing the pain, or what treatment you need. Hip pain comes from tendons, bursae, the joint itself, the lower back and occasionally from things that are not musculoskeletal at all, and no set of questions separates those. Groin pain that is severe, sudden, follows an injury, or comes with fever or unexplained weight loss needs a doctor rather than a questionnaire.