Single-Item Instruments to Measure Aspects of Whole Person Care for an Inpatient Palliative Care Chaplain's Clinical Note: An Examination of Tools.

This article focuses on evaluating the psychometric properties of single-item instruments designed to measure whole-person care components for documentation in inpatient palliative care chaplains’ clinical notes. Three single-item tools were identified: two assessing quality of life (QoL)—including the question, "How satisfied are you currently with your physical and emotional well-being?"—and one assessing quality of care, the "Heard and Understood" (HU) question, which asks patients how much they felt heard and understood by healthcare staff. The QoL question demonstrated satisfactory criterion validity in a German advanced cancer population, while the HU question showed promising face and content validity in U.S.-based English-speaking hospitalized advanced cancer patients. The article highlights the need for further research to validate these tools across diverse populations and to explore their feasibility and acceptability for chaplain use in clinical documentation to enhance interprofessional palliative care.