Home Care Services: A Study On The Assessment Scale For The Child

Objective To develop an assessment scale for child home care, in order to help the nurses evaluate children's home care needs, to provide foundations for further study on the model of child home care services. Methods Based on Orem's self-care model, through literature review, qualitative interview and Delphi method, and at last the assessment scale came into being after. Then the scale was used by professional nurses to assess 589 children who were going to be discharged from two Shanghai hospitals, and the data were analyzed by SPSS11.5. Results①The evaluation scale includes three parts, which are children's health, the item assessment of children's home care need, and the home care grading.②Reliability analysis: the internal consistency reliability was 0.805; the inter-raters reliability: the co-factors of the two hospitals were separately 0.84 and 0.83, p<0.05. Validity analysis: content validity: atα=0.10 level, all items and their respective dimensions had maximum correlation, and their coefficients were between 0.513-0.824; construct validity: after analysis for significance, an eigen value greater than 1.0 was established as the selection standard, and 3 factors which cumulatively explaining 37.204% of the variance were selected as co-factors.③The comprehensive evaluation: the completion rate of the scale was 91%; the average time to complete the assessment scale was 18.15±3.659min, and 84.2% of the evaluators considered the time reasonable. Conclusion Presently, the children's home health care services which could be carried out in Shanghai communities are made up by 4 kinds of services including 25 items. To meet the children's needs of healthy development, the home care services should focus on health prevention and health education. Meanwhile, carrying out necessary and feasible technique service in home care can alleviate the burden of the hospital; contribute to the continuity as well as personalization of children's care. The contents of the assessment scale have satisfactory validity and reliability, also the results shows its good scientific nature and feasibility, so it can be used as the assessment tool by community nurses to evaluate the home health care needs for the children.