Is the Life Space Assessment applicable to a palliative care population? Its relationship to measures of performance and quality of life.

Context: The spatial environments that palliative care patients frequent for business and leisure constrict as their disease progresses and their physical functioning deteriorates. Measuring a person's movement within his or her own environment is a clinically relevant and patient-centered outcome because it measures function in a way that reflects actual and not theoretical participation.

Objectives: This exploratory study set out to test whether the Life-Space Assessment (LSA) would correlate with other commonly used palliative care outcome measures of function and quality of life.