ABSTRACT
Introduction: The care of the elderly in the community includes the need to develop better cooperation with the elderly and their families as well as modern methods to deal with health problems of the elderly living in the community.
Purpose: To assess the cooperation between relatives of elderly patients and nurses by piloting a tool developed for this purpose.
Material and Method: In this prospective, descriptive study of 111 relatives (response rate: 65.3%) elderly patients over 65 in general hospital of the 6th health region of Peloponnese completed in a period of five months the Family Collaboration Scale Scale (FCS36) which covers the following dimensions: Influence on decisions, Trust and its prerequisites, Quality of contact, Achieved Information level, Influence on discharge.
Results: Factor analysis revealed five factors. The percentage of total variance of the five factors was 48.4%. Acceptable reliability of Cronbach’s a was found in all the factors, ranging from 0.71 for the Trust to 0.91 for the Influence on the decisions which are above the acceptable limit (0.7). The correlation coefficient between the factors were in most cases significant, indicating good validity structure. The questionnaire was found to have good resolution as all the factors found to vary with the degree of satisfaction.
Conclusions: Collaboration is defined as a process where two or more people “work together to create or achieve the same thing,” which in this study is the successful care of the elderly. The above scale of cooperation with the family has been found suitable and applicable in Greece, thus, there is a reliable tool for the assessment of family care and practice implications.