The Pleasant Events Schedule - nursing home version: a useful tool for behavioral interventions in long-term care

Behavioral interventions for depression emphasize increasing engagement in pleasant events, requiring reliable and valid assessment of events. Versions of the Pleasant Events Schedule (PES) have been developed for this purpose. Although depression is prevalent in nursing homes, no PES version is yet available specifically for this setting, where access to pleasant events is circumscribed. Our goal was to develop and evaluate a nursing home version of the PES.

We developed the PES-NH on two samples of nursing home residents. We first sampled activity frequency and pleasantness for 10 residents of a large, urban facility. Using these pilot data and PES-Alzheimer's Disease items, we interviewed 37 more residents from the same facility, yielding a comprehensive list of events that residents find pleasant. From the second sample of 48 residents, we present normative and psychometric data on the new scale.

A 30-item inventory was able to cover the content of daily activities available in nursing homes. Scales derived from these items were internally consistent and reliable over time. Frequency of event participation was related to perceptions of quality of life, depression and positive affect independent of the overall tendency to rate events as pleasantness. Event participation was unrelated to negative affect, suggesting that activity engagement is linked to depression through its impact on positive affect.

Data from this study provide base rate information for planning pleasant event interventions in nursing homes. The PES-NH is a useful and valid tool for implementing behavioral interventions for depression in these settings.