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JOURNEYS

JOURNEYS: A Quality of Life Scale for Pets (Dr Katie Hilst, Journey's Home)

Owner-completed 8-item end-of-life scale by Dr Katie Hilst of Journey's Home, complementary to HHHHHMM. Different domain coverage and opposite directionality (higher is worse).

Overview

Developer
Dr Katie Hilst, DVM (Journey's Home, HilstVet.com)
Year published
2014
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; sits alongside HHHHHMM weekly and the daily Sightline Score check-in.

Cut-off and interpretation

Cut-off threshold
17

Source: Hilst-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 Dr Hilst describes the conversation as 'likely time'.

Citation and validation

Hilst K. JOURNEYS: A Quality of Life Scale for Pets. Journey's Home Pet Euthanasia. Published at www.HilstVet.com.

Revisions

  • v1.0 (Dr Katie Hilst, Journey's Home): original Hilst 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

This QOL scale was created by Dr. Katie Hilst of Journey's Home at www.HilstVet.com. The JOURNEYS scale is distributed by Dr Hilst with no formal copyright notice and has been shared freely with the veterinary community for over a decade; Sightline reproduces it with the verbatim Hilst credit line on every surface that renders the scale.

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; Dr Hilst has distributed the scale freely to the veterinary community for over a decade.
  • 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 Hilst 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 the verbatim Hilst attribution renders on every surface 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.