%0 Journal Article
%T Can care of elderly be measured? A method for estimating the individual care of recipients in community health care
%A Kajsa BE Thorsell
%A Berit M Nordstr£żm
%A Per Nyberg
%A Bengt V Sivberg
%J BMC Geriatrics
%D 2006
%I BioMed Central
%R 10.1186/1471-2318-6-14
%X All recipients in 13 sheltered homes for elderly care (n = 505) in a Swedish municipality were surveyed regarding the care they needed, in dimensions of General Care, Medical Care, Cognitive Dysfunction and Rehabilitation, and the time required. Construct validity was assessed by means of factor analysis. The inter-rater agreement of two raters concerning 79 recipients was measured using weighted Kappa. The stability of the instrument and its sensitivity to change were investigated through test-retest reliability measurements, conducted once a month during a six-month period. The content validity of the instrument was also assessed.Factor analysis resulted in a reduction of the number of items from 25 to 16 in three dimensions: General Care, Medical Care and Cognitive Dysfunction. The Kappa analysis showed satisfactory to excellent inter-rater agreement. The care need scores were basically stable but showed sensitivity to change in health status.The instrument was found to be useful and reliable for assessing individual needs in community health care.Almost every country in the Western world has great difficulties allocating enough financial resources to meet the needs in the care of the increasing elderly population. The main problem is common to all countries and concerns the efforts to meet elderly persons' needs on an individual level while still maintaining society's responsibility for distributing justice. The aim of this study is to elaborate an instrument for the measurement of the quality of individual care and staff's working time in order to allocate public resources fairly. Such an instrument needs to be easy to use, be clearly accepted, and be anchored in the staff of the health promoting-organization [1,2].Since the 1980s, patient classification systems such as the Katz ADL index [3] and the Resident Assessment Instrument (RAI) [4] are uniform assessment systems used to assess and plan the care of residents in virtually all U.S. nursing homes. The RAI
%U http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2318/6/14