Instrument N

Title: California Skilled Nursing Facility Interview Guide

Designer:Catherine McGregor, RN, MSN, FNS, Sutter Auburn Faith Hospital. Please credit her in any publications and public presentations.

Suitable for Quality Improvement? Yes, edited to suit your state.

Suitable for research?No.

Description of Instrument:This interview guide is designed for face-to-face interviews with one or more nursing facility personnel involved with POLST at their facility. The interview helps the interviewer understand how POLST is working in that facility and what challenges and resources are present. The data collected is all free text, so aggregating it would be challenging unless you devised a systematic way of answering each question, however I think the intent of this instrument is to guide planned POLST education that a skilled POLST educator would then provide to personnel at the facility. It would also be a good preliminary step to learn more about how POLST is and is not working in your community before embarking on a more structured QA or QI activity.

How to use:

Step 1: Modify the form to suit your purposes. The questions are fairly specific so if you are worried about people being willing to speak up you could start with a more open-ended question such as ‘tell me about your experiences with POLST here’. Since these items were devised with specific educational objectives in mind, you may not need all the questions and may have others that you want to add. You may find items in other instruments elsewhere in the toolkit and want to include them and that is fine.

Step 2: Set up your face-to-face interview. This could be with an administrator or director of nursing or with a group of interested or selected personnel from the facility.

Step 3:Conduct your interview or focus group.

Step 4: Review the results. As noted, if you do these interviews at multiple facilities you may have some difficulty in aggregating the responses. It’s probably more important that you take away ideas about what needs improvement and what is working well, or important lessons or examples from each interview that will improve your educational interventions.

Some of the results that you will get from this survey include:

  1. Who in the facility is a (potential) POLST champion?
  2. What are the facilities’ policies and procedures for POLST?
  3. What is the facilities experience with POLST?
  4. How well educated and knowledgeable are the respondents about POLST?
  5. What do the respondents find challenging about POLST?
  6. How is POLST working between the facility and EMS?