The Comprehensive Assessment and Aeferral Evaluation (CARE) covers a wide range of psychiatric, medical, and social problems. It has been, for certain purposes, reduced to a relatively brief instrument, the SHORT-CARE, that measures three major content areas: depression, dementia, and disability. The SHORT-CARE includes additional items for arriving at operational diagnoses that have public health relevance (pervasive depression, pervasive dementia, and personal time dependency). The reliability and validity of the scales in the SHORT-CARE, as well as their relationship to operational diagnoses, are discussed. The interrater reliability correlations of the SHORT-CARE scales are .94, .76, and .91, respectively for depression, dementia and disability. Internal consistency coefficients for the three scales are .75, .64, and .84. The scales are useful for measurement of severity and change; the operational diagnoses for prediction of service utilization and outcome.