OBJECTIVES: The Adult Social Care Outcomes Toolkit (ASCOT) is a preference-based instrument specifically designed to measure outcomes in long-term care (LTC) users. Although this instrument has been translated into Hong Kong (HK) Chinese version, there is a lack of HK-specific value set that reflects societal preferences. This study aims to elicit preference weights in the local general adult population.

METHODS: The ASCOT instrument comprised of eight domains: control over daily life, personal cleanliness, food and drink, safety, social contact, occupation, home cleanliness, and dignity. These domains reflect different quality of life aspects for LTC users. A cross-sectional online survey with the best-worst scaling (BWS) profile case method was administered to a representative general population sample (N=1000) based upon age and gender. In the BWS survey, the respondents were required to imagine themselves needing LTC and then select the best and worst choices from a profile of eight attribute levels. Orthogonal main effects plans were used to generate 32 states. To reduce response burden, the states were divided into four blocks; each block containing eight states, and respondents were randomly assigned to one of the blocks.

RESULTS: The online survey has so far recruited 127 out of 1000 respondents, with 37% aged 55 or over, 47% male, and the majority with a secondary educational level or above. The completion time for BWS survey ranged from 2.5 to 36.8 minutes, with an average of 6.5 minutes. The multinominal logit model revealed that the most valued attributes were ‘control over daily life’ and ‘occupation’ at their highest levels, while the least valued were ‘safety’ and ‘food and drink’ at their lowest levels.

CONCLUSIONS: The survey is ongoing to recruit a target of 1000 general population participants. The results will generate a population-based value set for ASCOT, and facilitate the use of economic evaluation in LTC in HK.