Standards in Long‐term Care Facilities

Attention has been increasingly devoted to the development of methods for assessing the quality of care in long‐term care (LTC) facilities, especially for government surveillance. A study is described which used the tracer method to provide data on the quality of care in Israeli LTC institutions. Advantages of the tracer method include its incorporation of structural, process and outcome measures and its focus on a number of representative tracer conditions. The study tested the ability of the tracer method to provide data on the quality of care, and facilitated adoption of this methodology by the government for their annual inspections.