All Tools and Resources

All Tools and Resources

You have our permission to use our tools provided that you include the attribution listed and you do not modify the tools.

Family Caregiver Activation in Transitions^® (FCAT^®) Tool

The FCAT tool^® was developed to foster more productive interactions between health care professionals and family caregivers. Because it was developed with direct input from family caregivers, the items are both relevant to actual experience and are relatively easy to understand. We designed the FCAT tool^® to be administered by a health professional or self-administered by the family caregiver at the point of care at the time of transition or shortly thereafter. The responses could then be reviewed by the care team. Those areas that the family caregiver identified as not feeling confident or prepared through completing the tool would be specifically addressed during discharge preparation instruction.

Care Transitions Measure^® Tools

With support from The Commonwealth Fund, The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Paul Beeson Faculty Scholars in Aging, Dr. Coleman and colleagues designed a 15-item uni-dimensional measure, the Care Transitions Measure (CTM^®), to assess the quality of care transitions. The primary objective of this endeavor has been to develop a measure that is both substantively and methodologically consistent with the concept of patient-centeredness, and useful for the purpose of performance measurement and subsequent public report.

DECAF™ Family Caregiver Tool

Greater Recognition for the Integral Role of Family Caregivers: More effective collaboration is needed between family caregivers and health care professionals in order to improve care coordination across settings. During care transitions, family caregivers make important contributions to ensuring quality, safety, and adherence to patient preferences and their roles need to be formally recognized. An important initial step in this regard is to develop a standardized approach to defining the type and intensity of the roles family caregivers contribute to facilitate planning to promote care planning and execution. One potential working definition is the “DECAF” classification developed by our Care Transitions Program^®. Modeled after the TNM system used in cancer, each of the letters of DECAFTM refer to a different contribution made by a family caregiver: D= Direct Care Provision, E= Emotional Support, C= Care Coordination, A= Advocacy, and F= Financial. Each category is scored from 0 (no contribution) to 3 (significant contribution) for an overall aggregate score that ranges from 0-15.