Background information, test contents and ordering details can be found at RBANS.
The main practical advantage of the RBANS is its brief administration time (between twenty and thirty minutes), which maximizes patient cooperation and minimizes fatigue on performance. These are both important considerations especially for older patients, given that other neuropsychological status tests can take up to eight hours to administer. In addition, the RBANS is portable, which makes for easy for bedside administration and has equivalent alternate forms, which removes the practice effect for accurate retesting.
The RBANS is considered to be a reliable test, especially in terms of test-retest reliability as compared to other tests such as the WAIS-3. It has high construct validity for diagnosing neurocognitive impairments in schizophrenia, traumatic brain injury and stroke. The battery also has high criterion (predictive) validity for employment outcomes in schizophrenia, functional outcomes of stroke rehabilitation and medication compliance in HIV patients.
While the RBANS has a moderate level of difficulty, it has been established that educational, ethnic and socioeconomic factors may affect the accuracy of the scores. Furthermore, due to fact that normative scores are based on those of native English speakers, the generalizability of score may be limited. Another problem that may be encountered is the fact that scores showing an actual change in the level of functioning need to be relatively large in retest performance to ensure that they are not the result of an error in measurement.
Overall the RBANS seems to be a highly effective instrument that has been widely adopted by professionals in the field, particularly for inpatient evaluations when comprehensive evaluation is not possible or necessary.