Quality-of-life Assessment
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WHEN SHOULD QUALITY IMPROVEMENT INTERVIEWS WITH RESIDENTS BE CONDUCTED?
If your facility, like most nursing facilities, does not routinely interview residents to assess their quality of care and life, then we recommend that you start small, focusing first on a subset of residents, such as new admissions, or on a single care process or other activity that you want to improve. With this in mind, here are two suggestions for when to conduct resident interviews:
- At admission, when you are required to assess, as part of the Minimum Data Set (MDS), a new resident's care preferences. If completing the MDS plus a quality improvement (QI) interview takes too long for one sitting, then schedule the QI interview for the next day or as close to the MDS as possible. Tying your quality care assessment to the MDS will help ensure that it is completed in a time-efficient manner. In addition, it will help you meet federal mandates: the MDS requires that nursing home staff ask residents their preferences related to food, dining location, social activities, bedtimes, and so on.
- Just before an improvement intervention or a change in care practice is implemented, and then again after sufficient time has passed for residents to have registered the change in routine. You need interview only those residents who are the target of your improvement effort. You can compare findings from the before and after assessments to determine whether your intervention or change in practice is making a positive difference in the lives of residents.
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