Quality-of-life Assessment
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WHAT QUESTIONS ARE MOST USEFUL FOR QUALITY IMPROVEMENT PURPOSES?
You can develop interview questions that specifically address the care areas and aspects of quality of life that are the focus of your facility's improvement efforts. In general, interview questions should:
- Require a simple yes/no response.
- Be direct, short, and concrete.
- Focus on daily occurrences, because these are most recent and tangible in the resident's memory. Ideally, questions should be posed shortly after the occurrence of the care or other activity in question.
- Should include discrepancy questions that compare residents' preferences for care to their perceptions of the care they actually receive (e.g., "How many times during the day would you like the staff to help you to the bathroom?" vs. "How many times during the day do the staff help you to the bathroom?"). You can score such questions by subtracting the second answer from the first. For example, if a resident says he is provided toileting assistance once a day but he prefers to receive assistance three times a day, then the discrepancy score is -2 (i.e., 1-3 = -2). The negative difference signals unmet needs. Although discrepancy questions are most appropriate for evaluating care frequency preferences, they can also be used to evaluate other aspects of care, such as dining location ("Where do you like to have breakfast? versus "Where do you have breakfast?"), or timeliness of care (e.g., "What time do staff help you out of bed in the morning?" versus "What time would you like for staff to help you out of bed in the morning?")
- Should include some structured open-ended questions (e.g., "If you could change something about the toileting schedule or the way staff help you to use the toilet, what would it be?").
Question sets that meet all these criteria are available in this training module for the following care areas:
Feel free to adopt or adapt these questions, all of them tested in our own research, for use in your facility. Each interview protocol requires approximately 10 to 15 minutes to complete per resident.
(Question List | Next Question)
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