International spread of the Longer-term Unmet Needs after Stroke (LUNS) questionnaire
The Longer-term Unmet Needs after Stroke Questionnaire (LUNS) questionnaire is a 22 item questionnaire that measures the longer-term problems affecting physical, social and mental well-being in the special context of longer-term stroke care. LUNS was developed by the Centre of Ageing and Rehabilitation as part of a National Institute for Health Research funded programme grant. The study results shows that LUNS is acceptable to stroke patients and has good validity and test-retest reliability, therefore providing a simple and reliable method for identifying longer term unmet needs after stroke.
As recommended by the National Stroke Strategy and Accelerating Stroke Improvement Programme, LUNS can be used for identifying the longer term unmet needs for an individual stroke patient during a post stroke review. In addition, LUNS can also be used to provide a survey of the longer term unmet needs of stroke patients within a service, to evaluate how well a service is meeting the needs of its stroke patients.
The questionnaire is being widely used internationally in service provision and research. LUNS have been translated (and in the process of) into different languages to use and validate against different populations (including in the Netherlands, France, China, Korea, Brazil and Malawi). The Dutch team validated LUNS against the Dutch stroke population and was concluded to be feasible, reliable and valid. https://www.strokejournal.org/article/S1052-3057(17)30464-0/pdf
