gms | German Medical Science

Background and current research: The discussion of long-term care outcome captures different strands of elaborating stakeholders’ perspectives for defining their benefit assumptions as well as organizational models. Therefore, nursing outcome and actors-related benefit aspects shall be distinguished. This distinction is linked between differentiated nursing arrangements in various settings with trying to identify further latent factors.

Research questions: We want to develop an appropriate evidence-based outcome measurement strategy that can be embedded within a taxonomy in order to formulate an induced cluster analysis. Hence, we classified long-term care outcome relationships by differentiating this term with respect to various benefit assessments of nursing strategies or care risks and their related benefit expectations and perceptions.

Methods: We employ a specified scoping review strategy referring to Arksey/O’Malley [1]:

1.

We start with a baseline heuristic for measuring outcome in combination with stakeholders’ views and

2.

we identify first results that are contingent to our baseline heuristic. The PCC-Scheme has been employed because of its focuses on population (care-receiver), concepts (variety of care and nursing arrangements and its economic implications) and context (differentiating long-term care settings).

3.

We cluster the results starting with the PCC-Scheme focusing on different economic or performance-measuring factors.

Results: This research process was initially started by an analysis of the textual words contained in the titles and abstracts of the relevant articles. The search strategy addressing the research period 2012 to 2023 was undertaken by using five databases, i.e. Ebsco, Pubmed, Medline, Cinahl and PsychInfo. The keywords and index terms were used in the following matter: “long-term care” “output”, “outcome”, “utility”, “benefit”, “effectiveness”, “efficiency” or “performance” are combined with “care-giver”, or “care-receiver” or “nursing home”, “long term care facilities” and “residential care”.

Discussion: We can exclude the terms benefit und utility because these terms seems to be less specific to interpret long-term care outcomes comprehensively. As a next step we started to cluster the outcomes referring to Ariaans et al. [2]. We broaden the approach focusing on latent factors as ownership attributes on the supply side or household income of care-givers.

Implications: The scoping review helps to narrow the perceived interpretation of outcome measurements considering identified different stakeholder perspectives. We can elaborate some additional explanatory research strategies especially with a focus on efficiency and performance. We will explore those relationships more in detail to differentiate agent-based awareness of outcome from attempts to interpret outcome only from a macro point of view.