The IFCI provides speech & language therapists working in the acute hospital setting with a measure of how well in-patients with communication difficulties can communicate in relevant hospital situations. Assessing the patient’s ability to communicate is crucial for successful health care. With the IFCI, the therapist has a structured assessment that provides a comprehensive evaluation of the everyday communication needs of patients whilst they are in hospital. The interview is conducted in three parts: gathering relevant information from the patient’s medical history; interviewing the patient and interviewing any relevant members of the health care team. Finally the clinician writes an overall summary, which will describe the patient’s ability to communicate in the hospital setting, identifies the strategies that facilitate effective communication and identifies any goals for intervention. The IFCI consists of fifteen hospital communication situations that were identified by observing the communication that occurs between staff and patients in an acute hospital setting. The situations were selected because they ranked the highest in terms of importance in providing health care, importance from a patient perspective, ease of observation, how typical they were of hospital situations, and that they could all be assessed at the patient’s bedside within a 30-45 minute period.