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Development of the Carers’ Alert Thermometer

Knighting K et al. "Development of the Carers’ Alert Thermometer (CAT) to identify family carers struggling with caring for someone dying at home: a mixed method consensus study." BMC Palliative Care 14, 22, 2015.

Key findings used in wiki

  • CAT is a ten-question traffic-light alert tool intended to identify and prioritize support needs and produce an action plan.
  • Development involved 117 carers and 128 professionals; the final readability and usability pilot was small.
  • It originated with carers of people with cancer and advanced progressive illness in the final year of life, although the official site reports later use in other long-term and progressive conditions.
  • It is completed jointly with a practitioner or support person and therefore is not a direct transplant into an automated SMS scale.
  • CAT is the closest reviewed comparator to an action-routing profile, but its context, administration model, and evidence do not make it a complete replacement for GC-SDOH.