The demographic ageing witnessed in industrialized countries leads those involved in the healthcare system to revise and adapt ageing care models by acting upstream of dependency situations. This paper discusses the potentials and limitations of the “Resident Assessment Instrument—Home Care” (RAI-HC), a tool used in clinical routine by home care nurses. The RAI-HC allows evaluation of the overall health condition of patients and establishment of objectives for individualized care plans. The quality and the nature of the information gathered with the RAI-HC is enough to allow the development of indexes and scores reflecting concepts widely used in gerontology, such as frailty, comorbidity. and complexity. However, to fully respond to the challenges of dependency prevention, the RAI-HC evaluation needs to be completed by the use of clinical tools suited for specific domains and by adapted training. This issue is illustrated by two home care situations: the screenings of undernutrition and cognitive deficits.
Keywords
- assessment
- home care
- elderly
- screening
- vulnerability