We have recently published a resource that summarises the evidence for different community-based frailty interventions. This blog post gives an overview of the document and its features.
Why focus on frailty?
A person with frailty can experience serious adverse consequences following even a relatively minor illness. Its impact can be very significant in terms of consequent disability or admission to a nursing home.
If frailty is identified at an early stage and individuals are targeted with evidence-based interventions that can manage frailty, or reverse it, this can improve people’s quality of life and wellbeing. This reduces the likelihood that they will need to access unplanned services due to a crisis, which, in turn, reduces the use of expensive, unscheduled care.
The community-based interventions that can make a difference
The literature on frailty is vast. For the purposes of our resource we focused on interventions in frailty that are community-based, focused on the prevention of harms or poor outcomes, and supported by relatively high-level evidence. The Evidence and Evaluation for Improvement Team carried out literature searches and produced evidence summaries for the following topics:
- Exercise interventions and physical activity
- Polypharmacy review
- Immunisation
- Primary care interventions
- Community geriatric services
- Lifestyle factors: physical activity diet, obesity, smoking alcohol and their relation to frailty
- Nutritional interventions for the prevention and treatment of frailty
- Hospital at home: admission prevention and early discharge
- Reablement (including rehabilitation)
- Bed-based intermediate care
- Anticipatory care planning
Making the evidence accessible
We then created visual abstracts for each topic, which allow readers to compare the different interventions at a glance, and provide a route into the more detailed evidence summaries and further reading. The visual abstracts include information on the potential benefits of each intervention, evidence quality, costs, and frailty level:
We hope that this document will help Health and Social Care Partnerships to compare different interventions for frailty and the evidence behind them, and to consider which interventions could make a difference for people with frailty in their local areas.
You can access the report, Living Well in Communities with Frailty: evidence for what works by clicking on the document image below:
Living Well in Communities blog 