Development and Validation of a Reablement Competency Scale for Home Health Therapists in Taiwan

Taiwan's long-term care policy prioritizes the integration of home health services with reablement. Herein, we designed a scale to evaluate reablement competencies among home health therapists using Sorensen's framework and assess the reablement competencies of home health therapists with experience in reablement in Taiwan.

We employed a modified Delphi method to develop the assessment scale. The finalized 32-item scale exhibited satisfactory reliability and content validity following a three-round Delphi consensus process.

The findings indicated that home health therapists with in-person collaboration experience with home care assistants achieved higher competency scores than those without the collaboration experience. Additionally, reablement competencies were specifically associated with experience in reablement services rather than general clinical healthcare experience.

In alignment with Taiwan's long-term care policy on reablement, this evidence-based study assessed the competencies required for reablement service providers. In the future, practitioners should focus on the unique contextual skills of reablement at long-term settings, while fostering in-person interdisciplinary collaboration between home health therapists and home care assistants to further enhance reablement competencies in practice.