The application of a factor evaluation system for community nursing in The Netherlands

In the literature both advantages and disadvantages are mentioned for factor and prototype patient classification systems. In this study a secondary analysis is used to explore the variance which is explained by a prototype and a factor evaluation classification system of the same patients. In the prototype evaluation system, the care types which were applied resulted in heterogeneous visit times. To explore the factor evaluation system, multiple regression analyses were executed with the average visit time per patient as dependent variable and the activities (separate or aggregated per category) as independent variables. Results show that the activities explain the average visiting time per patient better than the developed care types do.