Care Comprehensive Assessment in Home Health Care : Qualitative Content Analysis

Healthcare has greatly changed due to issues such as disease structure changes and a rapidly aging population with decreasing birthrate, also patients’ preference of receiving care at home. Home health care nurses need to assess the needs and limitations of the  patient and family for holistic approach aimed at empowering patients, families, and caregivers to achieve their highest levels of physical, functional, spiritual, and psychosocial health. Therefore home health care nurses should have the skills to assessing in Home health care. The aim of this study was to explore the home health care nurses’ experiences of assessment competency.

The present study is a qualitative content analysis that was conducted in home health care centers in Tehran, Iran in 2020. Data were collected through unstructured interviews with 15 home health care nurses, and sampling continued until data was saturation and then, the analysis was performed by the method of conventional content analysis in accordance with Zhang's approach.

content analysis of the data led to the extraction of the 76 cods , 12 subcategories, 3 categories and one theme of assessment in home health care that included categories: comprehensive assessment of the patient, assessment of the family and assessment of the care environment. The home care nurse for the competence of comprehensive  assessment  of the patient is essential has the skills of patient assessment the physically, self-care, mental and psychological, socio-economic status, culture,  ethics and behavior and also for the competency of family assessment should have  assessment skills of family in rate of adaptation and acceptance of Patient, cooperation in care and awareness and educability, and for the competency of assessment the patient care environment, have the skills of structural and physical assessment of the home environment, assess of equipment required for patient care and assess the patient's access to medical and support centers.

The findings of the study provided one of the HHC nurses' competencies namely assessment competency in home health care, which contributes to practice HHC nurses can assess their professional activity and think over the aspects to be completed and refined. Also, there can be a basis for educational curriculum development.