10.55. Eating and Meal Preparation Skills Assessment (EMPSA)

A 12-item self-report assessment tool designed to measure eating disordered clients’ perceived ability and motivation to perform 12 eating and meal preparation tasks.

Eating and Meal Preparation Skills Assessment scores range from 0 (no ability/motivation) to 10 (total ability/motivation), and clients are given the opportunity to add qualitative comments regarding each of the 12 tasks. The mean of these scores provided a subscale score for both Ability and Motivation.

10.55.1. Intellectual property rights

Copyright © November 2011 Laura Lock, Associate Director of OT, South West London & St Georges Mental Health NHS Trust. All rights reserved.

Email from Laura Lock (Spurgeon’s College, London) to Jeremy Solly (Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust, CPFT) on 9th December 2024:

I would delighted for you to use the EMPSA, at no charge, provided that:

  1. you don’t change it in any way

  2. you fully reference it accurately

  3. from time to time, you provide me with a copy of any (anonymised) collated outcome measure reports

Email from Laura Lock to Rudolf Cardinal on 3rd Jul 2025:

I am the EMPSA copyright holder, but I permit unrestricted use as long as it is not changed in any way and is fully referenced.

10.55.2. History

Lock L, Williams H, Bamford B, Lacey JH. The St George’s eating disorders service meal preparation group for inpatients and day patients pursuing full recovery: a pilot study. Eur Eat Disord Rev. 2012;20(3):218-224. https://doi.org/10.1002/erv.1134 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21910164/

10.55.3. Source

  • PDF emailed from Amy Shears (Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust, CPFT) to CamCOPS developers via Jeremy Solly (Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust, CPFT) on 3rd December 2024. The table of questions is identical to that in the Appendix of Lock et al. (2012) above.

10.55.4. Notes

The original instructions include the prompt “Please rate yourself from 1 to 10 in the following areas”, but then offer the anchor “0 = no ability/motivation” (for example: page 224 of Lock et al. 2012, as above, and the scanned PDF version). The text of the paper (e.g. page 220) makes it clear that 0-10 is intended. The scanned PDF version also includes the “1 to 10” prompt but 0/10 anchors. This was clarified by the creator (Laura Lock to Rudolf Cardinal, 2025-07-01), that [the prompt] “should read 0 to 10 as you suggest”. The CamCOPS implementation therefore amends the prompt to “Please rate yourself from 0 to 10…” and retains the 0/10 anchors.