MEASURING CARE AND DEPENDENCY OF ELDERLY PEOPLE IN RESIDENTIAL HOMES - AN UNRELIABLE EXERCISE

Objectives: to determine the correlation between a scale measuring the amount of care required by people in rest homes and two scales, the Booth scale and the composite scale which measure dependency. To examine the scales for retest reliability. Subjects: one hundred and twenty-five people aged 47 to 98 years, median age 84 years, living in seven rest homes in Dunedin. Method: subjects were assessed using the care, Booth and composite scales and the assessment repeated after four weeks. Results: the care scale test-retest reliability based on rank order correlates was 0.86. For the physical care items retest reliability was high but supervision and the management of behavioural problems showed poor retest reliability. Correlation between the care scale and the two dependency scales was only moderate (composite scale 0.64, Booth scale 0.55). Behavioural problems and the time for supervision were assessed on the care scale only and it was these components which accounted for most of the poor correlation between the care and dependency scales. Conclusion: the time required for the management of behavioural problems and supervision for some people in rest homes was considerable. Measurement of this was difficult and made assessment of individual residents in homes unreliable.