Prevalence of frailty on clinical wards: description and implications

This paper describes the prevalence and frailty level of patients aged > or = 75 years upon admission to various clinical wards. The data collection took place on five clinical wards of different clinical specialisms: Geriatric Centre, traumatology, pulmonology/rheumatology, internal medicine and surgical medicine. The Groningen Frailty Indicator was used to assess the frailty of newly admitted patients. The presence of number and kind of the various frailty indicators was different for the clinical wards, because of clinical diagnose, age and gender. On the Geriatric Centre, almost all patients were indicated as frail. On the other wards, 50-80% of the patients were indicated as frail with most frailty indicators on the scale 'psychosocial'. The study show a high prevalence of frail elderly on some wards and gives an indication of the various needs for other disciplines within the framework of the care for frail elderly people.