A Patient Reported Experience Measure (PREM) for use by older people in community services

BACKGROUND: intermediate care (IC) services operate between health and social care and are an essential component of integrated care for older people. Patient Reported Experience Measures (PREMs) offer an objective measure of user experience and a practical way to measure person-centred, integrated care in IC settings. OBJECTIVE: to describe the development of PREMs suitable for use in IC services and to examine their feasibility, acceptability and scaling properties. SETTING: 131 bed-based and 143 home-based or re-ablement IC services in England. METHODS: PREMs for each of home- and bed-based IC services were developed through consensus. These were incorporated into the 2013 NAIC and distributed to 50 consecutive users of each bed-based and 250 users of each home-based service. Return rates and patterns of missing data were examined. Scaling properties of the PREMs were examined with Mokken analysis. RESULTS: 1,832 responses were received from users of bed-based and 4,627 from home-based services (return rates 28 and 13%, respectively). Missing data were infrequent. Mokken analysis of completed bed-based PREMs (1,398) revealed 8 items measuring the same construct and forming a medium strength (Loevinger H 0.44) scale with acceptable reliability (ρ = 0.76). Analysis of completed home-based PREMs (3,392 records) revealed a medium-strength scale of 12 items (Loevinger H 0.41) with acceptable reliability (ρ = 0.81). CONCLUSIONS: the two PREMs offer a method to evaluate user experience of both bed- and home-based IC services. Each scale measures a single construct with moderate scaling properties, allowing summation of scores to give an overall measure of experience.