Palliative Care –Life Space Assessment (PC-LSA) Validation

Palliative care aims to minimize the impact of end-of-life symptoms, optimize physical functioning, and support people to engage with the activities they find meaningful for as long as possible. Being able to detect subtle changes in the degree to which palliative patients interact within their environment is an important outcome measure. The Life Space Assessment is a simple questionnaire that is designed as a measure of where a person goes, how often they go there, and what assistance they need to get there. It reflects participation in society as well as an individuals’ physical ability and their need for equipment or help from another person. However, it requires patients to reflect on their movements within their own home, immediate surroundings and neighborhood over a four week period, which is too long a time-frame for a palliative population.

Aim: The purpose of this study is to validate a Palliative Care Life-Space Assessment (PC-LSA) for use in community dwelling palliative care populations using a short-time frame follow up (Days 0, 7, 14, 21 and 28). The validation includes the examination of the reliability and validity of the modified instrument.

Study design: The PC-LSA validation study will last for 29 days and will be open to all patients who live in the community and are regularly visited by a community based palliative care service whose treating physician answered yes, to the ‘wouldn’t be surprised if they died in the next 12 months’ question.

Assessments: Participants will be asked on a weekly basis for four weeks (Day 0, 7, 14, 21) to recall their movement over the past week using the PC LSA questionnaire and at the end of four weeks (Day 28) participants will be asked to recall their movement over the past month, using the expanded LSA (Appendix 2). Assessing how reliably a palliative population can actually recall their movement over a 4 week period will help determine if the PC-LSA is sensitive enough to be reliably used with a community palliative care populations using a shorter follow up, such as weekly or fortnightly as opposed to every four weeks.

Palliative Care – Life Space Assessment (PC-LSA) Validation (19kb pdf).