The structure of the BMET follows that of other published hospital and shopping mall versions of the MET. Each requires the completion of six errands, finding four pieces of information, meeting someone at a specific location and time and telling the examiner when the exercise is completed, a total of 12 tasks. These must be done while following 9 specified rules. In the hospital versions, the six errands include buying 3 things, making a telephone call, mailing something and a more complex task.

The original hospital versions asked the client to “Pick up something from the information desk for the examiner and do what is necessary”. If the client asked, at the information desk, for ‘something for the examiner’, they were given an envelope with the following on the outside, “For the urgent attention of <insert examiner’s name>”. The expectation in the test was that the client would then immediately give the envelope to the examiner. In our lab, we found this item to be confusing for many clients and clinicians and in a post-hoc analysis of our published data (Dawson et al., 2009) found that healthy controls were as likely to make errors on this item as were people with acquired brain injury. Thus, in later versions of the BMET, we replaced this item with an interruption task to better reflect what happens in everyday life and allow observation of how someone responds when distracted. For the interruption, five minutes after the test starts, the tester interrupts the client saying, “Excuse me, there is one more thing to do”, and hands the client a piece of paper which states “Pick up a Baycrest Matters flyer and keep it with you until the end of the test”.

The naturalistic nature of the MET means that in many instances, site-specific versions of the assessment need to be developed. When site-specific versions are developed, it is critical that the tasks and rules align well with previously published versions in order that inferences may be drawn with regards to reliability, validity and interpretation of test results.

Reference: Dawson, D. R., Anderson, N. D., Burgess, P., Cooper, E., Krpan, K. M., & Stuss, D. T. (2009). Further Development of the Multiple Errands Test: Standardized  Scoring, Reliability, and Ecological Validity for the Baycrest Version. Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, 90(11 SUPPL. 1), S41–S51. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apmr.2009.07.012