Quality-of-life Assessment
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WHO SHOULD BE INTERVIEWED?
As a general rule, you should interview residents who score 2 or more on the Minimum Data Set (MDS) Recall subscale. Our research shows that these residents consistently provide reliable information useful for quality improvement efforts (1, 2). Ideally, the four MDS items that comprise the recall scale should be completed by nursing home staff who are familiar with the resident based on the most recent seven day period, as opposed to relying on the most recent MDS assessment data, which may be as much as three months old at any one point in time.
If your questions ask about services or care processes that occur daily, as opposed to less frequently, then you should also interview residents who score 1 (or more) on the MDS Recall subscale. Our research shows that the majority of these residents can reliably self-report pain and depression, express meaningful preferences for daily care (they can tell you, for example, what activities they like or what food they want for breakfast), and accurately describe care they receive on a daily basis (they can recall, for example, if someone on the staff helped them to the bathroom or to walk that day).
If you are assessing quality of care for a specific activity of daily living (ADL), interview residents (with appropriate MDS Recall subscores) who require any level of staff assistance (supervision to total dependence) for that ADL. You can use
MDS ADL ratings to identify appropriate interview candidates:
Residents should be asked questions about only the care activities that are relevant to them. Do not, for example, ask a bed-bound resident questions about getting in and out of bed or ask a resident completely incapable of walking questions about walking assistance.
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