Does it feel like in the era of COVID and constant staffing issues, you can’t possibly individualize care for your residents/clients? Does it feel like if you asked about resident/client preferences, they would be requesting surf and turf every night?
Did you see the suggestions from the National Imperative to Improve Nursing Home Quality highlighting person-centered care and are just not sure where to start?
We would like to suggest a path forward that will help you take the first steps.
In 2018, we published findings in the Journal of the American Medical Directors Association from a study that explored the top 10 shared preferences that are important to most consumers receiving long-term services and supports.
The 10 preferences that were either important or very important to the majority of nursing home residents included:
- Having regular contact with family
- Choosing what to eat
- Listening to music you like*
- Having regular contact with friends
- Watching/listening to TV
- Having privacy
- Going outside for fresh air when the weather is good*
- Giving gifts
- Choosing what time of the day to bathe
- Doing things away from the facility
*items identical to the MDS 3.0 Section F
These 10 items could form the starting point of your person-centered efforts as they reflect popular preferences. Using this core set of shared preferences can assist with relationship building, transitions in care, and quality improvement.
As you get better at assessing and incorporating these important preferences into daily care for your residents/clients, you could change the items you ask about. This can help in bringing preferences into practice to improve quality of care and quality of life to best meet the psychosocial needs of each person. You can find more information and resources on the topic here.
We have also partnered with Linked Senior to produce a quality improvement tool that assists you in understanding how well you are doing in meeting the preferences (as identified in Section F of the MDS 3.0). Care Preference Assessment of Satisfaction (ComPASS) walks you through the steps of asking about important preferences with follow-up questions to inform care delivery. Then it incorporates a way for you to ask residents/clients how satisfied they are with those preferences being met so you can direct scarce resources to what matters most.
While people do have individual differences, there are a lot of commonalities, and you will identify things that matter most to your resident/clients by starting with these items. We will discuss all these considerations further during our free #ActivitiesStrong webinar hosted by Linked Senior on Tuesday, Aug. 23rd, at 1 pm EST.
Katherine Abbott, Ph.D., MGS, FGSA, is the Executive Director of the Scripps Gerontology Center and a Professor of Gerontology at Miami University in Oxford, OH. She teaches graduate courses in Qualitative Research Methods and Organizations and the Aging Enterprise along with undergraduate courses in Social Network Analysis and Social Policy and Programs in Gerontology. Abbott is the co-founder of Preference Based Living, whose mission is to conduct studies that build understanding of individual preferences and test innovative methods to honor preferences for people.
Charles de Vilmorin is the CEO and co-founder of Linked Senior.
The opinions expressed in McKnight’s Long-Term Care News guest submissions are the author’s and are not necessarily those of McKnight’s Long-Term Care News or its editors.
