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DEVELOPMENT OF TOOLS TO MEASURE SERVICE USER AND CARER SATISFACTION WITH SINGLE SHARED ASSESSMENT
Guided Discussion guidance and schedule
The Guided Discussion consists of a schedule of five questions.
The questions are ones which people who use health and community care services and carers have said are very important to them about assessments.
They reflect the main themes which are covered in more detail in the questionnaire and interview schedule.
The questions are the topics for a Guided Discussion. As for all the methods in this Toolkit, the purpose of the Guided Discussion is to find out about the respondent's experience of and feelings about their Single Shared Assessment and most of all about what mattered to them about their Single Shared Assessment.
The Guided Discussion is for use when the Interview is impracticable. An interview could be impracticable because the Interview schedule contains too much detail or cannot be adapted satisfactorily to the respondent's own communication methods, for example as the respondent has complex cognitive, memory and/or communication difficulties.
The guiding principle in deciding which method to use is that capacity and involvement in the (pilot) research are assumed for
all respondents. The final decision about which method to use will best be made when the interviewer meets with the respondent, and their supporter if present.
In the Guided Discussion, the interviewer chooses the form of words and the order in which topics are broached. The list of questions from the Questionnaire and the Interview can be used as a prompt for expanding the discussion, if this is appropriate, to reflect a respondent's own interest.
Prior to meeting the person, the interviewer will have found out about the kind of communication environment which is best for the person they are interviewing and about any specific requirements, e.g. BSL signer, makaton or other symbol system, and will have made all the necessary arrangements to ensure that they communicate in the right way. They will also know the name of the assessor. It is likely that some people who are interviewed will have a carer, advocate, support worker or other person with them to help with communication and with responses to the discussion.
The interviewer will have a photo (or voice recording of the assessor) and any other prompts which will help the person they are interviewing remember the assessment meeting/s. The schedule can be provided in advance as a paper copy, in community languages, on audio tape, computer disk, online etc to anyone who wants this so that, for example, they can go over the questions etc beforehand.
Whilst for this research potential involvement is assumed for everyone who has had an SSA, in some instances a service user's carer or someone else close to them may effectively participate in the research on the person's behalf to a greater or lesser degree. In such situations, the evaluator will need to make a sensitive judgement about whether to ask the supporter/carer the questions in the guided discussion:
Guided Discussion
Explanation and discussion topics
Thank you for agreeing to help us with this piece of work. Anything you tell us will not be shared outside the [ name ] evaluation team.
These questions have been written with people who use health and community care services and carers. They talked about assessments for health and community care services. These are meetings like you had with [
name of respondent's assessor ] in [
date ].
They said that these are the really important questions :
1. Did
[ name] explain why you were having the assessment meeting ( or meetings ) so that you understood?
2 Did the assessor [
name] help you feel at ease at these assessment meetings?
3 Did [
name] make sure that you had your say, so that you could say what was important for you?
4 Has anything changed for you as a result of the assessment?
5 Is there anything else you would like to say about the assessment? (We may not have covered everything in our questions)
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