The Patient Complexity Instrument (PCI) is designed for assessing the complexity of a community-based adult patient’s care needs and producing an indicative score (1-5) within each of the six Likert scales, as perceived by the assessing District Nurse (DN).

 

The PCI is constructed of the issues identified by DNs in Wales as important for assessing the multiple, overlapping and interlinking biopsychosocial needs (or complexity) of patients on their caseloads.

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The PCI allows DNs to generate a description of a patient in the context of their home and community-based circumstances, to identify any areas of need that may require a range of care and support interventions to be planned.

The PCI may be used for a number of different purposes e.g.

• for undertaking a holistic, biopsychosocial assessment of need with an individual patient which results in a plan of care,

• briefing colleagues about an individual patient’s situation,

• understanding more about the needs of patients across a caseload,

• or as part of workload acuity calculation.