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JOURNEYS

JOURNEYS Quality of Life Scale (Lap of Love)

Owner-completed 8-item end-of-life scale by Lap of Love, complementary to HHHHHMM. Different domain coverage and opposite directionality (higher is worse).

Overview

Developer
Dani McVety, Mary Gardner — Lap of Love Veterinary Hospice
Year published
2017
Species
Canine and feline
Domain
End-of-life quality of life

Structure and administration

8 items spelling J O U R N E Y S (Jumping, Ouch, Uncertainty, Respiration, Nausea, Energy, Yelling, Sleep), each scored 0-10. Total 0-80, higher is worse.

Owner-completed, 4-6 minutes. Default cadence in hospice mode is fortnightly; the daily Lap of Love check-in handles day-to-day signal alongside HHHHHMM weekly.

Cut-off and interpretation

Cut-off threshold
17

Source: Lap of Love published bands: adequate 0-8, questionable 9-16, concern 17-36, likely time >=37. Threshold at 17 marks the entry to the concern band; >=37 is where Lap of Love describes the conversation as 'likely time'.

Citation and validation

McVety D, Gardner M. JOURNEYS Quality of Life Scale. Lap of Love Veterinary Hospice. Published at lapoflove.com.

Revisions

  • v1.0 (Lap of Love, McVety and Gardner) — original Lap of Love publication. Bands published as adequate / questionable / concern / likely time.

Target population

Pets in hospice or end-of-life care across both species. Pairs with HHHHHMM to triangulate domains: HHHHHMM weights comfort and routine, JOURNEYS weights symptoms and decline signals.

Available languages

English (UK)

Licence

Free for clinical use with citation (Lap of Love Veterinary Hospice). Confirm attribution with Lap of Love before public launch.

Scoring algorithm version

sightline-journeys-v1.0.0

Strengths

  • Eight published domains spelling JOURNEYS make the mnemonic memorable for owners; helps surface specific decline signals (yelling, breathing, sleep) that HHHHHMM does not.
  • Lower-fidelity domain breakdown than HHHHHMM but more focused on decline-signal symptoms — so the two scales complement rather than duplicate.
  • Free for clinical use with citation.
  • Bands explicitly named (adequate / questionable / concern / likely time) which gives clinicians and owners a shared vocabulary for the difficult conversation.

Limitations

  • Single composite total only; no inter-domain weighting or psychometric validation in the published Lap of Love material.
  • Direction is opposite to HHHHHMM, which can confuse owners who flip between the two — Sightline surfaces a 'lower is better' hint on the result page and the hospice dashboard's trajectory synthesis normalises both axes before combining.
  • Phase 1 ships English (UK); founder review confirms Lap of Love attribution before public launch.

Why Sightline uses it

JOURNEYS is the most widely-adopted complementary end-of-life scale to HHHHHMM. The two scales together cover the comfort axis (HHHHHMM) and the decline-signal axis (JOURNEYS), which gives the hospice dashboard a richer two-channel read. The trajectory line in S5-T6 normalises both to a single 0-100 axis so owners do not have to mentally invert one scale to compare them.