An exploration of how community care staff view "frailty"
Research type
Research Study
Full title
An exploration of the views of frailty among community care staff.
IRAS ID
224384
Contact name
Louise Lafortune
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust
Duration of Study in the UK
1 years, 2 months, 30 days
Research summary
Frail older adults have an increased risk of adverse outcomes, disability, hospitalisation, nursing home admission and death. Assessing frailty enables care providers to tailor the care they provide to patients in order to avert harm and improve patient outcomes. Various tools have been developed to aid the identification and assessment of frailty. However, little is known about how healthcare professionals view frailty and go about assessing frailty using the various tools available to them. It is important to ensure that frailty tools are used in a consistent and reliable manner across all community care staff. This provides reliable information which can be used to inform care planning and ensure that patients receive the best quality of care possible. This study aims to explore how community care staff of various specialities view frailty and go about assessing and managing frailty in older adults living in the community.
Qualitative in-depth face-to-face interviews will be conducted with community care staff of various specialities recruited from neighbourhood teams in Cambridgeshire. Thematic analysis will be used to explore the similarities and differences in the way community care staff view, assess and go about managing frailty. A word frequency query will also be run to identify the most common words used by community care staff to describe frailty.
Work is currently on-going to develop training on frailty and the use of frailty tools. The findings of this study not only add to the growing body of knowledge on frailty, but also hope to contribute towards the development of training programmes to adequately meet the needs of community care staff.
This study is sponsored by Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust and funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care (CLAHRC) East of England, CLAHRC Fellowship award.
REC name
London - West London & GTAC Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
17/LO/1680
Date of REC Opinion
27 Sep 2017
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion