The Care Keys Toolkit

The aim of the Care Keys project was to make a contribution to the improvement of long-term care on the level of the theory of care and carerelated quality of life, on the level of empirical enquiry into the relationships between care and care outcomes, and on the level of practical instruments and tools for care quality management. The theoretical and empirical results have been described elsewhere in this book, and this chapter will briefly describe the practical outcomes of the research (additional information and prototypes of the tools are available on the project website http://www.carekeys.net). The main objective was to develop a set of “key indicators” that could be used to guide care quality management, and to take the first steps in developing instruments and tools for practitioners using these indicators.

Combining a practical approach with the research objectives was motivated by two considerations. First, it is increasingly recognised that research has to look into the prospects and problems of dissemination and implementation of its results, if it wants to have an impact on practice. Simply to assume that good research results will find their way into care practice and to leave matters of implementation to educationalists or practitioners appears to be ineffective. At least the first steps towards practical implementation have to be taken by practice-oriented research to provide an “interface”. Second, many of the partners in the Care Keys project were directly involved in social and health care services and were well aware of the pressing need for practical improvements within their own arenas.