Assessment of Participants in Activities: Activities Version of Care Management

The Series: Elements of Planning and Coordinating Successful Activities
3. Assessment of Participants in Activities: Activities Version of Care Management

Activities at the Day Care setting need to be thoroughly assessed, planned, and coordinated before carrying out. There are various assessment tools in activities that are used at diverse day care centers; however, the following components of activities assessment are based on our experience at our center as activities professionals.

We believe that the assessment of participants in activities should be comprehensive from our participant’s functioning levels to goal/purposes of activities.

a. Participants’ Functioning Levels
-Our distinguished activities consist of physical, cognitive, intellectual, and social aspects. In order to protect every client during activities, each client’s functioning level should be assessed.
-Physical functioning level of each participant is crucial. Is a client ambulatory or non-ambulatory? With a cane, on a wheelchair occasionally, or a wheelchair-bound? How about arms, hands, shoulders, neck, skin, and foot? Vision problem? With glasses? Verbal ability to express herself/himself? Appropriate and safe shoes? Shoe laces are tightly knotted? Comfortable cloth? Every little thing in the physical functioning assessment should not be ignored before conducting activities. These assessments will be able to protect clients from harmful incidents during activities.
-Cognitive functioning level also needs to be assessed. As our center has clients with wide cognitive ranges from mild to late stage of memory impairments, cognitive functioning assessment should be done carefully. Is a client able to follow instruction and direction during activities? How is a short-term memory? Repetition?
-Physical and cognitive functions are connected each other. Some clients may retain a higher cognitive function with a severe physical limitation. Others may have lower cognitive function but they may physically fit and movable.
-What makes our clients feel achieved within their functioning levels? Limitations of physical and cognitive functions sometimes make clients have difficulties to feel achievement.

b. Participants’ Interests
-We investigate what our clients like to do for activities at our center as much as possible. Daily conversation and interaction with clients frequently tells us what they want and need. Especially, what they used to do for fun could be the key to lead us meaningful and successful activities.
-In addition, their past hobbies, occupations, roles in families, their nature of being themselves, personality, and current interests give us wonderful hints to plan reminiscence-related and/or therapeutic activities.

c. Goals/Purposes in Activities
-The last component of activities assessment, we believe, is to set up goals/purposes in activities before conducting activities for both staff members and our clients.
-As activities specialists, making clients with memory impairments feel achievement through various activities is our first goal at the Day Care Center. The second goal is to enhance clients’ quality of life by engaging with them through activities.
-For our clients, their goals in activities are diverse and multi-formed. Ideally, each client should have individual goals in activities; however, in a group setting, such as our Day Care Center, it could be delicate to establish individual goals for each client due to time restriction and staffing. Instead, we set up goals for clients as a group in activities, based on physical and cognitive functioning levels we stated earlier in the above.
-Then, how do we make them reach their goals in activities? Some need more socialization than others. Others require obtaining physical strength. We negotiate and combine several aspects of activities to make our clients group reaches their goals so that the quality of life, we hope, automatically is enhanced.

Assessment of participants in activities is composed of a great amount of perspectives, including participants’ functioning levels, their interests, and goals in activities. Our assessment tool above crucially plays a significant role in planning and coordinating activities. Moreover, we emphasize on interaction, communication, and socialization with our clients to assess them in activities beside the above tool.