Project News

Prof. Sutthichai explaining about Community-Long-term Care Personal Folder

LTOP Project plans to conduct regular surveys to measure effectiveness of Care model services to improve our system based on solid evidence. Thai and Japanese researchers specialized on long-term care on the elderly had various meetings to discuss on the ethics of fieldwork in Thailand, objective and subjective data analysis etc. to develop effective tool.

On the 5th February 2014 finally, the kick-off meeting to start survey was conducted at MOPH meeting room and the survey policy, method and schedule were shared to the working team members by Professor Sutthichai Jitapunkul, Chulalongkorn University.

Prof. Sutthichai has stressed that there is little Project measuring effectiveness and regularly revise Care services based on evidence so we are working for precious Project activity. He then introduced the "Community Long-term Care Personal Folder", the newly developed tool to measure flow of events in the each site and easily collected by Care Managers.

This folder is a tool for Care Managers to collect and manage information of the elderly in each site. Researchers can collect data from the folders and also additional questionnaire will be used to collect quantitative data in each site. Then, researchers will visit each site once again to conduct focus group interview to collect qualitative data and to feedback analysis, to tackle problems raised from each site and to further improve services.

I have summarized the current idea of method as below;

Overview of method (as of 5th February, 2014)

Target in 6 sites	Indicator	Method
The Frail Elderly	Situation of Long-term Care in need (ADL etc.), Economical situation, QOL, Satisfaction to the service	Community-Long-term Care Personal Folder Questionnaires
Care Givers	Care burden, QOL, Knowledge and skill, Satisfaction to the service	Questionnaires and focus group interview
Care Managers	Management skill, Satisfaction to the service	Questionnaires and focus group interview
Care Workers	Care skill, Satisfaction to the service, amount of work (to analyze cost-effectiveness)	Questionnaires, diary and focus group interview
Local Government Officers	Satisfaction to the service	Focus group interview

Prof. Sutthichai shared his philosophy to make the survey not to just collect evidence, but to return and feedback its lessons learnt to the field. At the end of February, the meeting with the Care managers in each site to explain about details of Community-Long-term Care Personal Folder and survey process is planned.

Group photo with Prof. Sutthichai, Mr. Enomoto (Chair) and participants