interRAI for Aged Care
What is the project doing?
The project is implementing interRAI, an assessment and care planning tools, at every District Health Board. It is a phased 3-4 year implementation that is reaching the final stages, with interRAI now in use in most all DHBs.
The project is delivering interRAI assessments for the assessment of older people, within a DHB’s community model of care, and is establishing a national interRAI training and competency service to ensure the quality of interRAI methodology training for all assessors.
It is also establishing two national interRAI software host services that every DHB and their associated service providers will use to access the interRAI assessments.
Why is it being done?
A number of government strategies and policies, dating back from the introduction of needs coordination in 1994, have supported the need for a validated assessment process. This was reinforced with the Guideline for Specialist Health Services for Older People (2004) which highlighted several identifiable steps that could improve the patient journey and the outcomes for older people:
- Assessment of older people should be comprehensive and multidimensional as this leads to provision of services to improve health and well-being of the older person and their carers.
- All older people with complex needs should be offered a multidimensional, comprehensive assessment when they come into contact with health care or social services, or when an assessment is requested by carers, family/whanau or professionals involved in their care.
- Assessment processes should be standardized across New Zealand
- A standardised assessment tool and standard methods of collecting, reporting and comparing data should be used
An evaluation of assessments tools throughout the world, commissioned by the New Zealand Guidelines Group concluded that the interRAI Home Care assessment is the best tool available for delivering consistent assessment and standardised data in most of the domains identified in the Guideline.
The project is targeted at assessment for people over 65 years who require needs assessment for access to long term publicly funded services. It is likely that DHB’s will also use the assessments for wider purposes.
What change will be noticed
Older people living in the community will receive better care and DHB’s will have better information with which to plan health needs of older people living in the community.
Assessment information will be taken once and stored in a central database, reducing the multiple assessments that often happened in the past.
Better integration and consistency of service will facilitate a reduction in unexpected admissions to emergency department. Careful assessment will enable alternatives to residential care to be identified, and there will be more capacity to measure client outcomes and ultimately measure service outcomes.
Project Phase
National Rollout
Milestone Dates
Project is in ‘go live’ stage
Governance
National programmes
Who is Involved
Project Manager: Dr Brigette Meehan, interRAI Senior Project Manager MoH
Progress Summary
Progress last period: Southern DHB is now ‘connected’ to the National interRAI Software Host Service’.
Testing of the migration/conversion of Hutt Valley DHB from old interRAI software to the National Hosted system is complete and is planned for weekend of April 8th/9th Latest release with integration for NHI being tested
16 DHBs have a Lead Practitioner trained to use the interRAI methodology (and the software that supports this) and are now training assessors within their respective DHBs
Software used to support learning and to evaluate assessor coding competency is now available to Lead Practitioners to support training in the community care assessments
Contact Us:
If you have any feedback or questions please email the project team on enquiries@ithealthboard.health.nz with the name of the project and your comments. We will respond to you within 5 working days.
