Compassion and person-centred care: Survey development for aged care workers

With a growing emphasis on personalised care, there is a need for effective workforce training to enable person-centred care (PCC) in aged care practice. The Australian aged care workforce is very diverse; thus, tools to evaluate compassion and PCC training need to reflect an understanding of these concepts relevant to the Australian context. There are currently no tools validated for use in aged care settings in Australia.

Two existing compassion and PCC questionnaires were modified for an Australian audience using cognitive interviews with aged care workers. The reliability of the modified questionnaires was assessed.

The modified questionnaires were found to have acceptable inter-reliability and test-retest intra-class correlation for the subscales and overall. However, the investigation also found low Cohen's kappa values between the test and retest responses for the individual items, subscales and overall, and had low inter-class correlation for individual items, indicating poor inter-rater agreement. High inter-item correlation scores also suggest the questions encapsulate overly similar constructs.

While further investigation of the psychometric properties of the new items is needed, these modified questionnaires may offer a method of assessing and re-assessing compassion and PCC using language that is understandable to the Australian aged care workforce. Tools to accurately measure Australian aged care staff perceptions of compassion and their ability to deliver PCC are important to improve the quality of care provided in aged care and facilitate the delivery of PCC in aged care settings.