New simple plan provides patient overview for staff

A new simple and comprehensive plan – the Care Planning Assessment Tool (CPAT) – has been developed to provide aged care services staff with an overview of the major problems being experienced by their patients.

The stated aim of CPAT is to provide a single tool that fixes attention on the common problems of the elderly patient receiving care and makes it simpler to document the information on which a care plan is based and reduce the use of ad hoc assessments.

Richard Fleming of Hammond Care, Sydney, and the Faculty of Health and Behavioural Sciences, University of Wollongong, has written in the December issue of the Australasian Journal on Ageing that “the availability of comprehensive, valid, and reliable information, which is trusted by staff members, is the foundation stone on which a good care plan can be built”.

The purpose of CPAT was to enable direct care staff with a minimum of training to collect and report information that would establish a baseline for future comparisons. It contains 60 questions covering the areas of communication, physical problems, self-help, confusion, social interaction, behavioural problems, psychiatric symptoms, and dependency on care.

A CPAT test was carried out which involved 48 randomly selected residents in a large aged care facility. The conclusion was that the tool “will be very useful for helping staff to come to a common understanding of the range and severity of the problems being experienced by those in their care”. The CPAT can be obtained free of charge for use in care planning from www.dementia.com.au.