Promoting Person-Centered Care for Older Adults: Development of the Long-Term Care Unit Environment Assessment Tool (LTCU-EAT)

Providing older people with quality long-term care (LTC) contributes to the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 3—Good Health and Well-being. Person-Centered Care (PCC) is the optimal approach that enhances the quality of life for older adults residing in LTC facilities. This study develops the Long-Term Care Unit Environment Assessment Tool (LTCU-EAT) to assess how LTC environments support PCC goals. The study was conducted in five steps. (1) Reviewing and revising assessment items based on existing literature; (2) Preliminary assessment and protocolling with expert opinions; (3) On-site assessments conducted by two raters among 21 LTC units across 13 facilities; (4) Reliability test of assessment items; (5) Scoring and reliability test of LTC unit samples. The LTCU-EAT, comprising 89 items distributed across 12 subscales within four themes, was developed based on a summary of 14 PCC goals. A total of 83 items (93.26%) demonstrated strong inter-rater reliability. The assessments of all LTC unit samples displayed good criterion-related validity. The LTCU-EAT is a valuable tool for conducting post-occupancy evaluation (POE) of LTC facilities, systematically evaluating the level of environment support for PCC, and providing empirical evidence for future research, policy and practice.

This creative work has been published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY 4.0) license which allows copying, and redistribution as well as adaptation of the original work provided appropriate credit is given to the original author and the conditions of the license are met.