Does it feel like in the era of COVID and constant staffing issues that you can’t possibly individualize care for your residents/clients? Does it feel like if you asked about resident/client preferences that they would be requesting surf and turf every night? Did you see the suggestions from the National Imperative to Improve Nursing Home Quality highlighting person-centered care and are just not sure where to start?

We would like to suggest a path forward that will help you take the first steps.

In 2018, we published findings from a study that explored the top 10 shared preferences that are important to most consumers receiving long-term services and supports.

The 10 preferences that were either important or very important to the majority of nursing home (NH) residents included;

• having regular contact with family,
• choosing what to eat,
• listening to music you like*,
• having regular contact with friends,
• watching/listening to TV,
• having privacy,
• going outside for fresh air when the weather is good*,
• giving gifts,
• choosing what time of the day to bathe, and
• doing things away from the NH.

*items identical to the MDS 3.0 Section F

These 10 items could form the starting point of your person-centered efforts as they reflect popular preferences. Using this core set of shared preferences can assist with relationship building, transitions in care, and quality improvement. As you get better at assessing and incorporating these important preferences into daily care for your residents/clients you could change the items you ask about. This can help in bringing preferences into practice to improve quality of care and quality of life to best meet the psychosocial needs of each person. If you are interested in more information and resources on the topic, please visit https://www.preferencebasedliving.com/

We have also partnered with Linked Senior to produce a quality improvement tool that assists you in understanding how well you are doing in meeting the preferences (as identified in Section F of the MDS 3.0). Care Preference Assessment of Satisfaction (ComPASS) walks you through the steps of asking about important preferences with follow-up questions to inform care delivery. Then it incorporates a way for you to ask residents/clients how satisfied they are with those preferences being met so you can direct scarce resources to what matters most.

While people do have individual differences, there are a lot of commonalities and you will identify things that matter most to your resident/clients by starting with these items. We will discuss all these considerations further during our free #ActivitiesStrong webinar hosted by Linked Senior on Tuesday, Aug. 23^rd at 1pm EST: https://marketing.linkedsenior.co/targeting-critical-staffing-resources-to-team-and-resident-purpose

Citation: Abbott, K.M., Klumpp, R., Leser, K., Straker, J., Gannod, G., & Van Haitsma, K. (2018). Delivering person-centered care: Important preferences for recipients of long-term services and supports.  Journal of the American Medical Directors Association, 19, 169-173. doi.org/10.1016/j.jamda.2017.10.005.

This blog post was written in partnership with Katherine Abbott, PhD, MGS, FGSA