News From the End of Life: Home health patients expect less care
August 1, 2002
News From the End of Life: Home health patients expect less care
Elderly people receiving home care may lower their standards of acceptability for meal preparation, bathing, and housekeeping when faced with their available resources, according to a study conducted by a group of researchers from Washington University in St. Louis.
Researchers used telephone interviews and nurse clinical reports based on in-home interviews with more than 100 elderly people discharged to home care after a hospital stay. The goal was to assess how nurses and elderly patients evaluated the sufficiency of care.
Professionals rated the amount of care, in both professional and informal care situations, as less sufficient than the elderly patients did. The nurses rated care as 2.73 on a four-point scale, vs. patient ratings of 3.21. Patients rated care higher than nurses in five areas: medications, bathing, shopping, money management, and housekeeping.
The amount of formal vs. informal care had no relationship to ratings for patients. Nurses, however, rated the sufficiency of care as lower when there were higher amounts of formal care. These findings suggest that higher amounts of formal care that are used to replace informal care cannot improve the quality of in-home supportive care.
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