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Published on: September 30, 2020
Tooling nurses to assess complexity in routine home care practice: Derivation of a complexity index from the
Catherine Busnel1, Fanny Vallet1, Catherine Ludwig2
1Research and Development Unit, Geneva Institution for Homecare and Assistance (imad), Carouge, Switzerland.
Aim:
Home care nurses often use the Resident Assessment Instrument-Home Care (interRAI-HC) to assess health needs. However, this tool does not assess complexity. This study proposes to derive a complexity index (CI) from the interRAI-HC using the operational definition of the dedicated COMID checklist (COmplexité Multidimensionnelle des prises en soins Infirmières à Domicile).
Design:
Data were collected at the baseline assessment of the fraXity study (N = 231, aged ≥ 65), which relied on an observational longitudinal design.
Methods:
Measures were the interRAI-HC, from which the CI binary variables were computed and the COMID, used as a reference.
Results:
Twenty-six CI variables were computed from the interRAI-HC, and all but three correlations were significant. The correlation between the CI score and the COMID score was ρ = 0.730 (p < .001).
Conclusions:
The study demonstrates that complexity can be assessed directly from the interRAI-HC by deriving a CI.
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