I am currently reading up on the research about the conservative management of ACL ruptures, and I happened upon a new outcome measure that I hadn’t seen before, called the Tegner Scale.

This is a simple 11 points scale from 0-10 which evaluates a patient’s current activity level. So a 10 on the Tegner Scale would indicate a professional athlete who is competing at the National or International level, whereas Level 0 is someone who is on sick leave or disability pension due to their injury.

Here are some of the reasons why I like this Tegner Scale:

1. It is a really quick Outcome Measure to put in at the end of the Subjective Assessment. So after establishing the athlete’s current activity, one could document their Tegner Score, then also establish their baseline. The difference between these scores can imply the degree of disability that they are experiencing, as a bigger score implies a greater distance from their baseline.
2. It also helps to quickly establish some goals for them to achieve. For example, Mr Jones is currently a Tegner 1 due to his ankle injury. His baseline is jogging in the hills 3-4 times a week, which makes him a Tegner 5. From here we can establish goals to get to Tegner 2/3/4 after X/Y/Z amount of weeks.
3. I think this would be a great tool for students and new graduates within MSK. In completing the Tegner Scale, they would be guided into asking more questions about their patient’s activity level in order to establish the score. This is something that I often saw with inexperienced MSK clinicians is that they were not specific with documenting their patient’s baseline and current activity levels.
4. Another example of its use was the article that led me to discovering it. They used the Tegner Score as an inclusion criteria for their study on ACL injuries.

What do you think about the Tegner Score? Do you have any more ideas how it could be used?