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Concordance with routine Clinical Frailty Scale screening in the frailty in European emergency departments (FEED)
Georgia Eagleton1, Ramazan Güven2, Thordis Thorsteinsdóttir3
1College of Life Sciences, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK.
Background:
Frailty screening determines who receive geriatric emergency medicine interventions that are of high importance for patient outcomes. However, post-implementation evaluations show around 50% older Emergency Department (ED) attenders to receive screening. Why and who are omitted from screening remains largely unstudied. This study gave opportunity to compare normal screening status to data from a targeted screening study.
Methods:
The parent Frailty in European Emergency Departments (FEED) study administered the Clinical Frailty Scale (CFS) to consecutive ED attenders on 04 July 2023. This present study considered a subset of sites which provided retrievable CFS data from a "normal day" two weeks prior. Symmetry and dependency of missing CFS entries with observed variables were assessed. The frailty distribution was then compared with the parent FEED study data.
Results:
A minority of sites (5/62) recorded CFS in retrievable format. 55 % "normal day" CFS entries were missing compared with 14 % consecutive attenders during the parent FEED study. While no pattern was evident in the FEED cohort, "normal day" CFS entries were more frequently missing with non-white ethnic group (76 %, vs 52 % with white group), self-presentation (68 %), and discharge home from ED (59 %). CFS distributions differed between the routine and research day datasets (p = 0.009).
Conclusion:
Our findings suggest systematic, non-random omission of CFS in normal screening practice, disproportionately affecting people with non-white ethnic group and self-presentation. This raises concern for limitations when routine CFS data are analysed and prompts study and improvement of concordance with screening.
