BACKGROUND: Elderly neglect is the most common kind of elderly abuse, but it did not be paid enough attention. Research regarding elderly abuse is rare, especially for elderly neglect. We will develop elderly neglect screening instrument and test its validity and reliability.

METHODS: We invited 10 specialists in gerontology, including those in industry, official government, and academic community, to develop elderly neglect screening instrument by expert validity. For reliability, we recruited 40 individuals aged 65 years and older to exam inter-rater reliability by 2 independent evaluators.

RESULTS: There were 7 components in elderly neglect screening instrument, including (1) basic information of the elderly, (2) health status of the elderly, (3) basic information of the caregiver, (4) index of the elderly neglect, (5) self-report of care quality, (6) caregiver-report of care quality, and (7) researcher evaluation. The content validity indices of 7 components of elderly neglect screening instrument were all above 0.9. For index of the elderly neglect, there were 8 items, including malnutrition, dehydration, decubitus ulcer, joints contracture, urine burn, self-hygiene, fall, and recurrent hospitalization. Its content validity index was 0.93. For inter-rater reliability, the intra-class correlation coefficient was 0.846.

CONCLUSION: We developed a screening instrument to enhance the identification of elderly neglect. Future studies are needed to investigate the clinical application of the instrument and how the instrument could correctly predict the proven cases of elderly neglect.