In a long-term care hospital with high risk older people, screening and assessment are extremely important to understand a patient’s situation and care needs. To determine the appropriate care needs, the information gathering process can be difficult and sometimes long. This is because it demands accuracy and the caregiver needs to understand all aspects of the caregiving situation of a patient. Three years ago, our hospital began a research work aimed at developing a systematic information gathering process that provides the rationale needed to develop service plans. We came up with an assessment tool that uses seven categories to identify the situation and needs of a patient and most likely to achieve the desired caregiving goals. This presentation will examine the earlier approach in comparison with our new assessment tool. It will show that before, the process of conducting an assessment was time consuming that required unnecessary work process of writing down a patient’s information so that it can be used to understand the caregiving needs. As opposed to the new assessment tool where we use mostly figures and graphs which is easy and effective for needs identification. It will further discuss our research findings based on the study of two elderly patients showing the success rates as well as challenges. Although this research is work in progress, our aim is to create a tool that is more effective in screening a patient and can be recommended as a model of good practice in caregiving.