At a glance
Number of items: 2 multi-item domains (Social Support and Care Confidence), plus an optional free-text comment.
Completion time: Around 2–3 minutes.
1. What is the Cared-For Questionnaire?
The Cared-For Questionnaire is a short, internally developed eHealthier PROM designed to summarise how well supported patients feel in their personal lives and how confident they feel in the care they receive. It combines a small set of items on perceived social support with a set of items on patients’ ratings of access, communication and overall experience with hospital/medical care. The goal is to provide clinicians with a simple overview that can support conversations about support needs and care experience.
The questionnaire is grouped into two main domains:
Social Support: This domain provides a snapshot of the patient’s perceived availability of emotional, social and practical support.
Care Confidence / Experience of Care: This domain summarises the patient’s confidence in, and experience of, their care environment (access, communication, technical quality and interpersonal manner).
Note: The Cared-For Questionnaire should be considered a pragmatic service measure rather than a fully validated research instrument.
2. How is it scored?
Scoring is implemented within the eHealthier platform and may evolve as the PROM is refined. The current approach is:
Social Support score: Responses to the Social Support items are converted to a 0–100 score reflecting perceived availability of support. Higher percentages indicate more consistent access to emotional, social and practical support.
Care Confidence score: Responses to the care experience items are converted to a 0–100 score reflecting how positively the patient rates their care. Higher percentages indicate more positive ratings of access, information, technical quality and interpersonal care.
Overall score: A combined 0–100 score derived from both domains to give a single “Cared-For” summary.
Population norm: Within the eHealthier dashboard, a population norm (e.g. 80.0) is displayed for each domain to provide a reference point for comparison.
Important:
- As this is an internal, non-validated instrument, the 0–100 scaling and population norms are based on eHealthier’s internal data and design choices rather than externally published validation studies.
- Thresholds for “low”, “medium” or “high” scores are service-level decisions and can be configured locally rather than being treated as fixed clinical cut-offs.
3. How do I interpret change over time?
Given that the Cared-For Questionnaire is not yet formally validated, scores are best interpreted as directional indicators rather than precise clinical cut-offs.
At a single time point:
- Lower Social Support scores suggest the patient may have limited practical or emotional support and could benefit from social work input, carer support, or community resources.
- Lower Care Confidence scores suggest issues with access, communication or trust in the care team and may warrant discussion at the next consultation.
- Comparing scores to the population norm (e.g. 80) can help identify patients who feel markedly less supported or confident than typical users of the service.
Over time:
Meaningful improvement: a noticeable increase in domain scores (for example, ≥10 points) suggests the patient feels more supported and/or more confident in their care.
Worsening: a sustained drop in scores (again, around ≥10 points as a pragmatic threshold) may indicate new stressors, deteriorating support, or negative care experiences and should prompt review.
Cautions: Because the tool is not formally validated, small changes should be interpreted with caution and always in the context of clinical judgement and patient narrative.