The Halliwick concept is widely used in different settings to promote joyful movement in water and swimming. To assess the swimming skills and progression of an individual swimmer, a valid and reliable measure should be used. The Halliwick-concept-based Swimming with Independent Measure (SWIM) was introduced for this purpose. We aimed to determine its content validity and inter-rater reliability. Fifty-four healthy children, 3.5-11 years old, from a mainstream swimming program participated in a content validity study. They were evaluated with SWIM and the national evaluation system of swimming abilities (classifying children into seven categories). To study the inter-rater reliability of SWIM, we included 37 children and youth from a Halliwick swimming program, aged 7-22 years, who were evaluated by two Halliwick instructors independently. The average SWIM score differed between national evaluation system categories and followed the expected order (P<0.001), whereby a ceiling effect was observed in the higher categories. High inter-rater reliability was found for all 11 SWIM items. The lowest reliability was observed for item G (sagittal rotation), although the estimates were still above 0.9. As expected, the highest reliability was observed for the total score (intraclass correlation 0.996). The validity of SWIM with respect to the national evaluation system of swimming abilities is high until the point where a swimmer is well adapted to water and already able to learn some swimming techniques. The inter-rater reliability of SWIM is very high; thus, we believe that SWIM can be used in further research and practice to follow the progress of swimmers.

The Measure of Processes of Care (MPOC) is a questionnaire for parents used to evaluate the behaviours of healthcare providers. We applied its 20-item version (MPOC-20) to explore the associations between parental evaluation of processes of care and child, parent and family characteristics in Slovenia. A novelty of our approach was the emphasis on the role of a key person. Parents of 235 children who were admitted as inpatients or outpatients of six institutions (hospitals and health centres) because of chronic illness or disability participated in the study. Parents were asked to fill in a general questionnaire on several characteristics of the child, child's health problems, the family and the therapy programmes, and MPOC-20. Univariate associations of the five MPOC-20 scale scores with child, parent and family characteristics were tested first. Multiple linear regression was used for modelling scale scores in relation to child, parent and family characteristics. The analyses singled out availability of a key person as the factor most consistently and unequivocally influencing parental satisfaction. We also found a general positive effect of male sex of the child on the MPOC-20 scores. Neither the present age of children nor age at the onset of health problems was found to be associated with MPOC-20 scores. We found no notable association of the number of health problems with the MPOC-20 scores, but observed clear differences when comparing parental satisfaction with processes of care between different participating institutions.