A community needs assessment: the care needs assessment pack for dementia (CarenapD)—its development, reliability and validity

✍ Scribed by Gregor McWalter; Hugh Toner; Alison McWalter; Jenny Eastwood; Mary Marshall; Tony Turvey

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1998
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 154 KB
• Volume: 13
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0885-6230
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1099-1166(199801)13:1<16::aid-gps721>3.0.co;2-n

✦ Synopsis

Objective:

To develop and evaluate a multidisciplinary needs assessment tool for people with dementia living in the community and their carers.

Design:

The measure was developed through applying a theory of need, generating content, consultation with potential users and refinement and evaluation. validity was established incrementally through the development process.

Setting:

The development and evaluation was conducted in a variety of settings, including multidisciplinary dementia community care teams, social work departments, day hospitals, and inpatient and residential care.

Patients:

The evaluation included community patients with a formal diagnosis of dementia (n = 34) and consultation with a multidisciplinary group of potential users (n = 23). the development process included inpatients with a formal diagnosis of dementia (n = 157) and consultation with potential users (n = 170) from a range of professions including both health and social care.

Measures:

Interrater reliability was assessed using the kappa statistic. social validity was estimated using a measure developed for this purpose as part of the development process.

Results:

The evaluation of interrater reliability demonstrated that three-quarters of assessors agreed on at least 85% of items in the carenapd. the kappa statistic demonstrated that agreement for 76.2% of items in the carenapd was 'good' or better (ie kappa >0.75), for 12.4% of items it was 'fair' or 'moderate' (ie kappa 0.35-0.60) and for the remaining 12 (11.4%) items for which kappa could not be calculated there was low intra-item variance and high agreement (>90%). there was good evidence for social validity.

Conclusions:

The carenapd is a reliable and valid multidisciplinary assessment of need for people with dementia living in the community and their carers.