The Tool for Understanding Residents' Needs as Individual Persons (TURNIP): construction and initial testing

Area of Science:

• Gerontology
• Healthcare Quality Improvement
• Nursing Research

Background:

• Person-centred care is crucial for high-quality aged care.
• Defining and implementing person-centred care remains a challenge in residential aged care settings.
• A need exists for validated tools to operationalize person-centred care.

Purpose of the Study:

• To construct and evaluate an intervention tool to increase person-centredness of care in residential aged care services.
• To develop a practical instrument for assessing and improving care delivery.
• To provide a framework for enhancing the quality of aged care.

Main Methods:

• Development of the Tool for Understanding Residents' Needs as Individual Persons (TURNIP) through literature reviews, expert consultation (n=22), and stakeholder interviews (n=67).
• Evaluation of the TURNIP's validity and reliability using statistical methods in an Australian sample of aged care staff (n=220).

Main Results:

• The 39-item TURNIP tool conceptualizes person-centred care across five dimensions: care environment, staff attitudes and knowledge about dementia, care organization, and care content.
• Psychometric testing demonstrated satisfactory validity and reliability, with a Cronbach's alpha of 0.89 for the total scale.
• The tool provides a clear conceptual structure for person-centred care interventions.

Conclusions:

• The TURNIP is a rigorously developed intervention tool with an explicit conceptual structure, contributing to the literature on person-centred care.
• The tool's clinically relevant items are ready for application in aged care settings.
• TURNIP can facilitate discussions and guide interventions to enhance person-centred care quality in aged care organizations.