Development of EASY-Care, for brief standardized assessment of the health and care needs of older people; with latest information about cross-national acceptability.

INTRODUCTION

The EASY-Care system has been developed in the past 20 years in the United States and Europe as a brief standardized method for assessing the perceptions of older people about their health and care needs and priorities for a service response. More recently, it has been adapted and tested for use in poor, middle-income, and rich countries across the world. In this article we review its development and report the latest data for cross-cultural acceptability to older people and their clinicians in 6 countries across 4 continents.

METHOD

We used a multicenter, mixed-method (quantitative and qualitative) approach to assess clinician (n = 37) and patient (n = 115) perspectives of acceptability of the EASY-Care Standard (2010) instrument. Data were collected between 2008 and 2012 in Iran, Colombia, India, Lesotho, Tonga, and the United Kingdom.

RESULTS

Key strengths identified included high levels of acceptability from both clinician and patient perspectives, with the tools seen as useful for identification of unmet need. Key recommendations included enhancing clarity in certain questions, ensuring it is not too long. Recommendations included minor context-specific adaptations, effective use of the screening questionnaire, and use of context-specific interviewer prompts.

CONCLUSIONS

The EASY-Care Standard has high levels of acceptability from both clinicians and patients across poor, middle-income, and rich countries and has the potential to become a global gold standard for holistic person-centered assessment.