A Patient Reported Experience Measure (PREM) for use by older people in community services

Objective: to describe the development of PREMs suitable for use in IC services and to examine their feasibility, acceptability and scaling properties. Setting: 131 bed-based and 143 home-based or re-ablement IC services in England. Methods: PREMs for each of home- and bed-based IC services were developed through consensus. These were incorporated into the 2013 NAIC and distributed to 50 consecutive users of each bed-based and 250 users of each home-based service. Return rates and patterns of missing data were examined. Scaling properties of the PREMs were examined with Mokken analysis. Results: 1,832 responses were received from users of bed-based and 4,627 from home-based services (return rates 28 and 13%, respectively). Missing data were infrequent. Mokken analysis of completed bed-based PREMs (1,398) revealed 8 items measuring the same construct and forming a medium strength (Loevinger H 0.44) scale with acceptable reliability (rho = 0.76). Analysis of completed home-based PREMs (3,392 records) revealed a medium-strength scale of 12 items (Loevinger H 0.41) with acceptable reliability (rho = 0.81). Conclusions: the two PREMs offer a method to evaluate user experience of both bed- and home-based IC services. Each scale measures a single construct with moderate scaling properties, allowing summation of scores to give an overall measure of experience.