industry & reform in partnership with professor Ann Netten from the University of Kent, who was involved in creating the Adult Social Care Outcomes Toolkit( ASCOT), a UK-developed measure that several countries have adopted.
industry & reform in partnership with professor Ann Netten from the University of Kent, who was involved in creating the Adult Social Care Outcomes Toolkit( ASCOT), a UK-developed measure that several countries have adopted.
ASCOT was designed to capture information about an individual’ s social care-related quality of life and forms the basis for the Australian tool.
Nursing Review sits down with Fine and Adam Stebbing, from Macquarie University’ s Department of Sociology, to discuss the development of the ACCOM and how it may come to be applied.
Care to compare?
A new survey allows clients and workers to give their opinions on quality with ease, offering researchers and providers an unobtrusive new tool for improving services.
Adam Stebbing and Michael Fine interviewed by Dallas Bastian
The researchers behind a survey tool that measures quality of life in community care have held a public seminar to detail its potential to contribute to understanding changes in the delivery of age services.
The team, comprising researchers from Macquarie University and the Australian Health Services Research Institute( AHSRI) at the University of Wollongong, was awarded an Australian Research Council linkage grant to develop the Australian Community Care Outcomes Measure( ACCOM), which aims to ensure that clients get the assistance and services important to them.
Macquarie lead professor Michael Fine says:“ Because it is difficult at present to assess the impact of providing care, it is easy for staff, clients or family carers to lose hope, or to become distressed about the problems faced by those who need help. This is where outcome measures come into play. They provide a standard way of measuring improvement, stability or deterioration in the most important aspects of an individual’ s life.”
When consumers complete the ACCOM, providers receive information on a number of different issues, such as whether people feel they have control over their daily activities, whether they’ re getting enough food and whether they feel they are engaging in meaningful social participation.
Case managers answer the same questions about the client and can compare their perception of a client’ s quality of life with the client’ s own feelings.
Researcher Dr Beatriz Cardona, from Macquarie University’ s Department of Sociology, says case managers can use this information to think about the care plan and improvements to how the service is being delivered.
The survey also includes an open question that allows consumers to elaborate on issues important to them or that aren’ t addressed specifically.
The researchers have partnered with community aged-care service providers the Whiddon Group, BaptistCare, Community Options Australia and KinCare, who all assist with making the ACCOM meaningful and practical.
The research team has also been working
NR: What does the ACCOM focus on? MF: The tool homes in on wellbeing of consumers over time, and that then becomes a measure of service quality. It can be used to monitor service efficiency and effectiveness. To do that, it breaks things down simply into three broad areas, one of which we need to ask the consumer about, and two of which [ involve ] data the services already hold.
We ask the consumer nine questions about their quality of life and one about their self-rated health. There’ s also one other question where they can say whatever they like about things. That’ s the consumer input area.
The first [ set of data that comes from the services ] is the demographic background. How old are they? Do they live alone? What sort of home do they live in? Is it their own? Is it rented? Is it an apartment or a house? [ We learn ] a little bit about their cultural background. The demographic data is always held on clients.
The other [ set of data the services provide ] comes from initial assessments; it’ s about clients’ need for care and their capabilities. What things do they need help with? What things can they manage to do themselves? What are the areas where they could improve? That data is also already held.
We then use that to compare like with like data; for example, [ we don’ t want to ] compare quality of life for different kinds of clients, because then you’ d find the services that had high-functioning clients also had high quality-of-life results, and services that dealt with highly dependent clients had perhaps lower quality of life. We can pull out those services with highdependency clients or clients living alone and compare those clients with others who are in the same circumstance.
The tool surveys case managers and clients about their views on care and quality of life. How is that information then used?
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