Assessment of need for nursing care

The ideal prerequisites for the evaluation of care needs in geriatric patients are mainly four: First a comprehensive assessment of the status of the geriatric patient. Second the existence of procedural standards. Third the existence of consensus about what quality standards in geriatric medicine could be and fourth a resource allocation system that gives some confidence in its capacity to set clinically sound incentives and its intention to guarantee quality and equity. Because of the fact, that the author is convinced that the US (Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (OBRA-87) mandated Minimum Data Set (MDS) for nursing homes with the connected Resident Assessment Instrument (RAI) meets some of these criterias, this system and the Resource Utilisation Groups (RUGs) case-mix methodology which is based on MDS data is described.