The accuracy of assessing clinical frailty from hospital record data.
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Can patient frailty be assessed accurately from routine inpatient case records using the Dalhousie Clinical Frailty Scale?
IRAS ID
248680
Contact name
Andrew Clegg
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 6 months, 1 days
Research summary
This is a prospective observational study that aims to assess whether frailty can be as accurately assessed through case note review as by face-to-face patient assessment.
Frailty is a significant problem associated with our ageing population, and is linked to mortality and other poor health outcomes. There are various ways of defining and measuring frailty; however, there has been limited application of these to hospital inpatient case notes.
This project aims to determine whether patient frailty can be assessed accurately from routine inpatient case records using the Rockwood Clinical (also known as the Dalhousie) Frailty Scale (CFS). This will involve measuring the level of agreement between scores obtained from face-to-face patient assessment (an already validated method) and those scored from hospital records on the same patients.
Hospital inpatients aged 65 or over will be eligible for inclusion. Data collection will occur on the acute medical and geriatric admissions units at Bradford Royal Infirmary. A hospital clinician will assign a frailty score based on a face-to-face assessment, following which two other clinicians will independently assign each participant a frailty score based solely on their inpatient case notes.
The level of agreement between the face to face and case note scores (and also between the two separate case note scores) will be statistically measured. Where there is disagreement between the two case note assessors’ scores, the more senior clinician’s case note score will be used to compare to the face to face score.
If the results from this study show good agreement between frailty scores in case notes and via clinical assessment, researchers will be able to conduct retrospective studies in the hospital setting that measure/account for the effect of frailty on outcomes using a validated tool. This will have uses for auditing/service evaluation and clinical practice as well as research.REC name
Yorkshire & The Humber - Bradford Leeds Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
18/YH/0374
Date of REC Opinion
30 Oct 2018
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion