The link between pain and frailty revealed: it’s time to move towards more effective pain management in older people

Dr. Marcos Saraiva is a geriatrician from the Division of Geriatrics of University of São Paulo Medical School, Brazil. He and his co-authors recently published the paper Persistent pain is a risk factor for frailty: a systematic review and meta-analysis from prospective longitudinal studies in Age and Ageing journal.

Pain is a very common condition in older people, ranging from 40% in community-dwelling older adults to 80% in institutionalised individuals. It is known that pain, especially persistent pain (defined as a painful experience that continues for a prolonged period of time that may or may not be associated with a recognisable disease process), is associated with depression, social isolation, anxiety, insomnia, falls, higher health costs, weight loss, greater vulnerability to stressors and functional loss in older people.

Managing Frailty and Delayed Transfers of Care in the Acute Setting: A call to get involved!

Debbie Hibbert  leads on the NHS Benchmarking Network’s community sector benchmarking projects, manages the Delayed Transfers of Care / Older People’s benchmarking projects, is the Project Manager for the National Audit of Intermediate Care (NAIC), and the National Audit of Care at the End of Life (NACEL). She tweets @Debbie_NHSBN 

In this blog, the Managing Frailty and Delayed Transfers of Care in the Acute Setting project is described. Clinicians are encouraged to get involved with this project, the outputs of which include a bespoke report for participants and access to an online benchmarking toolkit. To receive your log in details or for further information, please contact josh.davies@nhs.net.

Driving quality improvements in the care of older people remains a key issue for the NHS as the population of the UK ages. The NHS Benchmarking Network is back with another project following on from previous work on the care of older people, and delayed transfers of care.  The new project continues the Network’s six-year partnership with the BGS and will help our members to gather much needed data to inform service change and future strategic decisions.

The Paper Boat

Patricia Cantley works as a consultant physician in the Midlothian Hospital at Home Team, offering an alternative to hospital admission for frail and older patients. She also works in the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh and in the Community Hospital in Midlothian. She tweets under her married name of Elliott as @Trisha_the_doc

I’ve been reading a lot recently about the word Frailty and its importance within Medicine for Older People. We see a lot of frail people and as geriatricians they are our core business both inside and outside the hospital.

Healthcare professionals have debated over the last few years how to define Frailty, and even how we might begin to measure it. It is no longer adequate simply to shrug and say “we know it when we see it”.

Is frailty becoming less fatal?

Professor Fiona Matthews is Professor of Epidemiology at Newcastle University, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK. In this blog, she shares a recent Age and Ageing publication looking at data collected since the 1990s on how much frailty exists in the population and whether it is more or less related to dying now than 30 years ago.

Most doctors involved in the care of older people would claim to know a frail patient when they see one. Being able to detect this frailty is crucial to ensure that treatment is appropriate, proportionate and likely to produce positive outcomes wherever possible. The measurement of frailty has become important recently with the inclusion of frailty within the requirements of an assessment in general practice, and tools to assist doctors in emergency departments evaluate frailty quickly. The most popular method for these investigations has been the frailty index, where diseases and impairments are added all together to give a score. The relationship between this frailty index and mortality has been seen across the world, giving rise to suggestions that it is one measure that is consistent across time and place.

ECFs and ANPs – The Future of Frailty?

Rachel Viggars is an Advanced Nurse Practitioner at Ashley Surgery (North Staffordshire CCG). Brigitte Knowles is a Elderly Care Facilitator at Madeley Surgery (North Staffordshire CCG). Both are undertaking the MSc Frailty and Integrated Care at Keele University.

We’ve always loved working with older people. Our roles in general practice certainly facilitate this!  When we were offered the opportunity to study at Masters Level in Medical Science: Frailty and Integrated Care, we jumped at the chance.  Finally, there was a focus on older people and an opportunity to improve standards and care.  But aside from this, it was a fantastic opportunity for us to complete a MSc in an area that we are passionate about, and the multi-professional learning that took place, really valued us as individual Health Care Professionals.  We were able to share and learn from the other professionals on the course and we really started to believe that we could do this and make a difference to our patient groups. 

Identifying older patients with frailty from routinely collected hospital data

Dr Thomas Gilbert is a consultant geriatrician (Hospices Civils de Lyon, FRANCE), with interests in Health Services Research. He worked with Dr Jenny Neuburger and colleagues from the Nuffield Trust in London on the development of the Hospital Frailty Risk Score whilst he was a clinical research fellow under the mentorship of Prof. Simon Conroy in Leicester (Department of Health Sciences).  He will be speaking at the Urgent care for frail older people event on 25 May at Horizon in Leeds. 

Advances in health care have helped people in developed countries live longer than ever before. This is good news for all of us, but it also presents a challenge to our health systems and a need to rethink the way that we provide healthcare. Out of nearly 20 million people admitted to an NHS hospital in the UK in 2015, a quarter were aged 75 years or older, and this proportion is set to increase.

For some older people, hospitalisation is associated with increased harms over and above their presenting clinical condition. Recognising that age alone is insufficient to identify and respond to such vulnerability, the term ‘frailty’ is increasingly being employed to highlight patients exposed to an increased risk of poor outcomes and likely to require higher resource use.

Where and how would you want to spend your last 1000 days?

Premila Fade is a Geriatrician with an interest in medical ethics and end of life care. Here she discusses BGS’s Living and Dying Well with Frailty event which was held on 6 March in London. She tweets @premzf 

If you were an older person living with frailty where and how would you want to spend your last 1000 days?  It is often difficult to accurately predict prognosis for older adults living with frailty and they have different needs at the end of life to younger people.  Traditional models of specialist palliative care do not always meet these needs or those of the carers and family supporting them.

What makes frailty different from other conditions at the end of life is that there can be prolonged periods of relative stability and then a potentially mild illness/insult causes a significant or catastrophic deterioration. This acute deterioration often triggers the conventional response to crisis – 999, ambulance to ED, investigations and the commencement of invasive medical treatment.

Uncontroversial truths; Discussing urgent care for older people

Stuart Parker is Professor of Geriatric Medicine at Newcastle University and a consultant physician at Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Trust where he is helping to develop an acute inpatient service for frail older people. Here he discusses the Urgent care for frail older people – Hospital Wide Comprehensive Geriatric Assessment Meeting on 25 May in Leeds.

Frailty is now widely recognised as a key component of declining health and function in old age.  Older people with urgent care needs are particularly likely to experience frailty.  New acute illness can trigger the onset of frailty in an older person who, in whom the limits of their functional capacity may be urgently revealed. Older people are increasingly the main users of urgent care services. Accordingly, urgent care services for older people need to be able to recognise, evaluate and manage frailty.

The Wild Wild Southwest: BGS Regional Meeting, Bath

Alasdair Miller is a ST6 Specialist Registrar in Geriatric Medicine at Royal United Hospital, Bath.

In the warm spell between the two flurries of snow and ice which have buffeted the UK in recent weeks, Bath’s Kingswood School Sports Pavilion played host to the Southwest Regional Meeting of the BGS. The event attracted a wide variety of attendees from different walks of Geriatric Medicine across the southwest- a multidisciplinary crowd ranging from junior trainees to eminent seniors, and with strong representation from both community and hospital teams. The day’s remit: to share learning and innovation from across the patch, update ourselves on topical and important areas within Geriatric Medicine, and foster links, cooperation and friendship with colleagues.

The link between frailty and losing teeth

Jess Walter is a freelance writer and mother. She loves the freedom that comes with freelance life and the additional time it means she gets to spend with her family and pets.

Bacteria accumulates in the mouth on a daily basis, and if patients don’t get rid of it by brushing and flossing twice a day, they could put themselves at risk of many health conditions. These include diabetes, aspiration pneumonia, and heart disease. According to stats published in Healthy Magazine, one in four adults in the UK don’t brush their teeth every day, while one in three have never flossed their teeth. Not cleaning between the teeth can leave up to 40 percent of the tooth exposed to bacteria. Imagine all that bacteria getting into the bloodstream where it can cause disease in the rest of the body. Now, a recent study has found that losing teeth could even result in frailty, which is especially a concern for seniors.