John N Morris

The interRAI Palliative Care (interRAI PC) assessment instrument provides a standardized, comprehensive means to identify person-specific need and supports clinicians to address important factors such as aspects of function, health, and social support. The interRAI Clinical Assessment Protocols (CAPs) inform clinicians of priority issues requiring further investigation where specific intervention may be warranted and equip clinicians with evidence to better inform development of a person-specific plan of care. This is the first study to describe the interRAI PC CAP development process and provide an overview of distributional properties of the eight interRAI PC CAPs among community dwelling adults receiving palliative home care services. Secondary data analysis used interRAI PC assessments (N = 6,769) collected as part of regular clinical practice at baseline (N = 6,769) and follow-up (N = 1,000). Clients across six regional jurisdictions in Ontario, Canada, assessed to receive palliative homecare services between 2006 and 2011 were included (mean age 70.0 years; ±13.4 years). Descriptive analyses focused on the eight interRAI PC CAPs: Fatigue, Sleep Disturbance, Nutrition, Pressure Ulcers, Pain, Dyspnea, Mood Disturbance and Delirium. The majority of clients triggered at least one CAP while two thirds triggered two or more. Triggering rates ranged from 74% for the Fatigue CAP to less than 15% for the Delirium and Pressure Ulcers CAPs. The hierarchical CAP triggering structure suggested Fatigue and Dyspnea CAPs were persistent issues prevalent among the majority of clients while Delirium and Pressure Ulcers CAPs rarely trigger in isolation and most often trigger later in the illness trajectory. When any of the eight interRAI PC CAPs are triggered, clinicians should take notice. CAPs triggered at high rates such as fatigue, dyspnea, and pain warrant increased attention for the majority of clients. Consideration of triggered CAPs provide evidence to inform a collaborative decision making process on whether or not issues raised by the CAPs should be addressed in the plan of care. Integrating evidence from the interRAI PC CAPs into the clinical decision making process support care planning to address client strengths, preferences and needs with greater acuity.

This manuscript describes a method for adjustment of nursing home quality indicators (QIs) defined using the Center for Medicaid & Medicare Services (CMS) nursing home resident assessment system, the Minimum Data Set (MDS). QIs are intended to characterize quality of care delivered in a facility. Threats to the validity of the measurement of presumed quality of care include baseline resident health and functional status, pattern of comorbidities, and facility case mix. The goal of obtaining a valid facility-level estimate of true quality of care should include adjustment for resident- and facility-level sources of variability.

The International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) is embraced as a framework to conceptualize human functioning and disability. Health professionals choose measures to represent the domains of the framework. The ICF coding classification is an administrative system but multiple studies have linked diverse clinical assessments to ICF codes. InterRAI-HC (home care) is an assessment designed to assist planning of care for patients receiving home care. Examining the relationship between the ICF and the interRAI HC is of particular interest because the interRAI assessments are widely used in clinical practice and research, are computerized, and uploaded to databases that serve multiple purposes including public reporting of quality in Canada and internationally. The objective of this study was to examine the relationship between the interRAI HC (home care) assessment and the ICF. Specifically, the goal was to determine the proportion of interRAI HC items that can be linked to each of the major domains of the ICF (Body Function, Body Structure, Activities and Participation, and the Environmental Factors), the chapters and the specific ICF codes.

A multi-domain suite of instruments has been developed by the interRAI research collaborative to support assessment and care planning in mental health, aged care and disability services. Each assessment instrument comprises items common to other instruments and specialized items exclusive to that instrument. This study examined the reliability of the items from five instruments supporting home care, long term care, mental health, palliative care and post-acute care.