The carewell in hospital questionnaire: A measure of frail elderly inpatient experiences with individualized and integrated hospital care

Abstract

Given our aging society with an increasing number of frail elderly patients, we must provide integrated care tailored to their complex needs regarding health and well‐being. The aim of this study was to develop and validate a questionnaire designed to assess how frail hospitalized elderly patients experience several important aspects of individualized and integrated care. An 8‐item questionnaire was developed using input from a panel representing the target group and administered to patients age ≥70 years from surgical, medical, and geriatric departments to measure data characteristics, internal consistency, test‐retest reliability, construct validity, and responsiveness. A total of 470 questionnaires were returned, including 78 for test‐retest reliability. Data were missing from 1.7% to 7.0% within the individual questions. The percentage of questions answered with “don't know” ranged 3.8% to 21.9%. Cronbach's α for internal consistency was 0.70. Test‐retest intraclass correlation was 0.75. Achievement of goals during the hospital stay was significantly correlated with the questionnaire score. Scores did not differ significantly between departments or between the before and after measurements related to an innovative intervention study in healthcare delivery. The CareWell in Hospital questionnaire has good content validity, internal consistency, and test‐retest reliability and warrants further research to explore responsiveness. Journal of Hospital Medicine 2014;9:324–329. © 2014 Society of Hospital Medicine

The CareWell in Hospital program to improve the quality of care for frail elderly inpatients: results of a before–after study with focus on surgical patients

“…During the CWH study, such a measure was actually developed. 39 As this measure still had to be validated, and no other nonhealth-related or non-disease-related patient-reported outcome measures/patient-reported experience measures for frail elderly patients were available at the start of the study, we could not yet report such an outcome here. Measures on satisfaction with care were also collected during a well-performed pragmatic study of Goldberg et al 40 concerning a specialist medical and mental health unit for elderly patients with cognitive impairment or delirium.…”