Measuring continuity of elders' posthospital care.
Continuity of care is a critical component of quality patient care, yet the paucity of reliable and valid measures of continuity of care make it difficult to ascertain the extent to which continuity has been achieved. The purpose of this article is to describe the development of an instrument to measure continuity of care that incorporates the perspectives of elders hospitalized for a chronic illness and their family caregivers. The instrument was used, and its reliability and validity examined, in a series of studies related to elders' posthospital transition. Elders in the studies ranged in age from 55 to 94 years. The findings supported content and construct validity, internal consistency reliability, and ability to detect changes in the same subjects at different points in time for the care management and services subscales. With further refinement, the continuity of provider and conflicting information subscales might also facilitate assessment of care continuity.
Bull
M J
MJ
University of Maryland, School of Nursing, Department of Community Health and Psychiatric Nursing, Baltimore 21201-1545, USA.
Luo
D
D
Maruyama
G M
GM
D000359:Aftercare; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D002908:Chronic Disease; D003266:Continuity of Patient Care; D005163:Factor Analysis, Statistical; D006299:Health Services for the Aged; D006801:Humans; D008875:Middle Aged; D015146:Midwestern United States; D015403:Nursing Evaluation Research / Q000379:methods*; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires