title: Quality of life in long-term forensic psychiatric care: comparison of self-report and proxy assessments.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  To compare quality of life (QoL) ratings of long term forensic psychiatric care patients with the ratings of psychiatric nurses, in which the nurses indicate how they think the patient would answer.
  
  
  METHODS
  Agreement on QoL-scores according to the Forensic inpatient Quality of Life Questionnaire (FQL) was investigated for seventy- seven pairs of patients and psychiatric nurses from two forensic psychiatric long-care facilities where QoL is seen as an important treatment goal. This study also examined whether the amount of agreement was related to specific patient characteristics and characteristics of the patient- psychiatric nurse relationship.
  
  
  RESULTS
  On group level, only small and mostly non-significant differences were found between patients' and psychiatric nurses' mean QoL scores. However, pairwise comparisons revealed poor agreement between patients' and nurses' QoL scores for half of the domains and moderate agreement on the other half of the domains, except for Leave, which was the only domain on which patients and their nurses had similar scores. Patient characteristics such as type of offence and type of psychopathology were negligibly related to the level of agreement. However, characteristics of the patient-nurse relationship such as age of the nurse and length of the patient-nurse relationship did influence the amount of consensus between patients' and proxies' QoL-scores significantly.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Nurses were not sufficiently able to accurately estimate their patients' QoL experience and could probably benefit from a training aimed at assessing QoL of their patients and how to support their patients in optimizing their QoL themselves.
authors.affiliation: Forensic Psychiatric Hospital Pompefoundation, Division Diagnostics Research and Education, 6503 CK Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Electronic address: s.schel@pompestichting.nl.
authors.forename: Sandra Helena Hendrika
authors.initials: SH
authors.lastname: Schel
authors.affiliation: Forensic Psychiatric Hospital Pompefoundation, Division Diagnostics Research and Education, 6503 CK Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Electronic address: y.bouman@pompestichting.nl.
authors.forename: Yvonne Helena Alexandra
authors.initials: YH
authors.lastname: Bouman
authors.affiliation: Forensic Psychiatric Hospital Pompefoundation, Division Diagnostics Research and Education, 6503 CK Nijmegen, The Netherlands; Behavioural Science Institute (BSI) of Radboud University, 6500 HE Nijmegen, The Netherlands; Academic Centre for Social Sciences (ACSW), Radboud University, 6500 HE Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Electronic address: e.bulten@pompestichting.nl.
authors.forename: Berend Hendrik
authors.initials: BH
authors.lastname: Bulten
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D019090:Case Management; D003134:Commitment of Persons with Psychiatric Disorders; D005260:Female; D005555:Forensic Psychiatry; D006801:Humans; D007318:Inservice Training; D008134:Long-Term Care / Q000523:psychology*; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009723:Nurse-Patient Relations; D010552:Personality Assessment; D011329:Prisoners / Q000523:psychology*; D011568:Psychiatric Nursing / Q000193:education; D011788:Quality of Life / Q000523:psychology*; D057566:Self Report; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires