A Review of Methods for Assessing the Care Needs of Patients with Disabilities

Introduction: The care needs of patients with disabilities are often neglected or not fully identified. Knowing the different methods of assessment can help the care team to choose the best and most comprehensive method of assessing care needs. Methods: This scoping review study was designed and implemented with a 5-step Arksey & O'Malley approach. the search strategy was set using the keywords "patient with disability", "disabled", "care need assessment", "need assessment", "disability". To find Persian and English language articles and dissertations, PubMed, Embase, Scopus, web of sciences, Cochrane google scholar, SID Magiran databases were searched by two researchers separately until October 2019. Oral abstracts or lectures were removed from the search domain. hand search of studies, a list of sources of highly relevant articles, and key journals were conducted. Finally, studies that focused on assessing care needs in patients with neurological disorders were selected and after studying and extracting the data, the findings were summarized and reported. Results: Out of 5968 articles found, 1011 duplicate articles were removed and by reviewing the titles and abstracts of the remaining 4957 studies, 370 articles were selected for the full text study, of which only 7 were selected to the final report. Findings indicated that care needs assessment was performed in these studies through the Northwick Park Dependency Score and Care Needs Assessment needs assessment checklist, and semi-structured face-to-face interviews. Conclusions: Each method of quantitative and qualitative evaluation has its advantages and limitations. Since the assessment of care needs requires a comprehensive and comprehensive study, understanding the various quantitative and qualitative methods of assessing the needs of patients in this study can lead members of care team to identify and use appropriate methods.