Information, Support and Training for Relatives of People with Aphasia

Audit checklist

We are making available an audit checklist for exploring provision for relatives and carers of people with aphasia. We carry out this work in association with North East Trust for Aphasia (NETA).

The checklist encapsulates recommendations in a functional format. It enables services to:

• look at their care pathway
• develop interventions
• assess whether their provision is helpful

It is a flexible tool, that can explore relatives’ perceptions of service provision in the clinical situation, or in research.

Designed for clinicians

We created this checklist for clinicians who:

• are interested in a user perspective on relatives’ needs.
• wish to track their interventions for relatives and carers of people with aphasia
• want to explore methods for using qualitative data to measure outcome

Researchers interested in quality of care may also find our checklist a valuable resource.

Intervention tracking

There is an expectation for modern services to incorporate service users’ feedback. This can help improve planning and monitoring provision.

There is also evidence of a gap between perceived needs and current service provision for this population. Service providers can use intervention tracking to measure the quality of their care.

Routine measurement of its effectiveness validates the best use of resources.

Monitoring my practice

The checklist informs clinicians of the quality of their care for relatives of people with aphasia.

This evidence-based tool can:

• facilitate in-depth exploration of a relative’s experience
• examine a specific aspect of intervention, e.g. information giving, for a service
• explore a particular phase of the care pathway e.g. acute or rehabilitation
• track a cohort’s experience over a whole care pathway

Capturing individual differences

The tool is both reflective and dynamic. It can track expected intervention needs, and add to the evidence base. It achieves this by embracing novel recommendations from participants. The tool incorporates novel perspectives into the checklist. This adds to the qualitative evidence base.

Checklist benefits

Supporting clinicians’ professional development

This checklist provides relevant guidelines in an accessible format. Clinicians can use it to support their understanding of relatives’ needs. This allows them to provide an evidence based service.

It includes a referenced resource for clinicians and researchers. Detail from the checklist can guide reflection on practice. This enables clinicians to develop their experience and confidence in this field.

Quality of care

The framework of data has research applications as the basis for tools to explore need and quality of care. The same approach is transferable to other conditions of care, where quantifying the quality of care is desirable.

Accessing the tool

You can download both parts of the tool here:

• Audit Checklist
• Background‌

The downloads include details of the pilot study and references. You may copy the materials for your own use and disseminating to others. We only ask that you acknowledge the origin of the resource and the authors in publications.