A checklist for comprehensive health assessment for the over 70's

Abstract

Objectives: To describe the development and performance of an instrument for health assessment of older Australian veterans and war widows, including: (a) the underlying dimensions of the assessment instrument, (b) problems identified and (c) associations with health related quality of life. Method: Participants were randomly selected veterans and war widows aged 70 years and over, living independently in 10 regions of NSW and QLD. The intervention consisted of a series of preventive care home visit health assessments by health professionals using a specially developed 113‐item screening checklist, together with targeted health education materials, telephone follow‐up and computer generated reports to the veteran's local medical officer. Main outcome measures were underlying facets of the checklist, and associations with self reported quality of life. Results: 904 home visit assessments were conducted using the checklist. Problems identified included having no recent hearing check, poor rate of vaccination against pneumonia and tetanus vaccination, and problems with feet. Exploratory factor analysis of the checklist reported four main factors, explaining 31% of the variance. Three out of four checklist scales were significantly associated with both physical and mental component scores of the SF‐36 quality of life measure.Conclusions: The preventive care checklist proved easy to administer, acceptable to participants, and contained valid items for use with an older veteran population.