The role of nutrition and exercise in maintaining muscle mass, strength and function pre and post falls and fractures. With an ageing population, strategies that help older adults to maintain their independence for longer are increasingly important.
Helping older adults to stay independent for longer
Dementia – the forgotten cardiovascular disease
In general, deaths from cardiovascular disease (CVD) are falling, except for the forgotten CVD, dementia. The rate of dementia is rising year on year and it is now one of the top 5 causes of death in the UK. Risk factors for dementia are similar to other CVDs and risk modification can reduce the risk of development of the condition.
Living with frailty: A guide for primary care
Frailty is a distinctive health state related to the ageing process in which multiple body systems gradually lose their in-built reserves. This means the person is vulnerable to dramatic, sudden changes in health triggered by seemingly small events such as a minor infection or a change in medication. BJPCN, Volume 12, Special Issue 1, Jan-Feb-Mar […]
Back to Basics: Identifying people with frailty in primary care
Why we need a new approach to managing people with frailty
Frailty is a distinctive health state related to the ageing process in which multiple body systems gradually lose their in-built reserves. This means the person is vulnerable to dramatic, sudden changes in health triggered by seemingly small events such as a minor infection or a change in medication.
Understanding frailty as a long-term condition
Acommonly heard clinical expression is “He/she is very frail”. It provides a summary statement of an older person that implies concerns over vulnerability and prognosis. This is how we have conventionally considered frailty—as a descriptive label: ‘the frail elderly’. In this article, we will re-frame frailty in a potentially more helpful way. We will examine frailty from the perspective of an abnormal health state that behaves just like a long-term condition. This conceptualisation of frailty opens up new approaches to helping people who are frail.
Improving end-of-life care in the community
Most nurses are involved in the care of the 1% of the population currently nearing the end of their lives: that is, people considered to be in their final year, months, weeks or days of life. The Gold Standards Framework (GSF) programmes can help provide a structured framework in this challenging area, leading to more proactive and consistent standards of care, and enabling more people to live well and die well where they choose.
Care and support planning for people with frailty
Supported self-management is feasible and desirable for people with mild frailty, but care and support planning is more appropriate for individuals with moderate frailty. This section considers how the primary healthcare team can apply a whole person and personalised approach to care and support planning.
Supported self-management for people with frailty
The first section of this supplement made the case to consider frailty from the perspective of a long-term condition. This and the next section explore what this means in terms of applying some of the well-developed models for the care of longterm conditions to people who are living with frailty. First, we examine how the highly evidence-based model of supported self-management might be applied to frailty.
Back to Basics: Frailty – top 10 tips for primary care
Frailty is the gradual loss of inner reserve as a result of the ageing process, leaving a person vulnerable to dramatic, sudden changes in health triggered by apparently small changes or events. Like other long-term conditions, frailty – if not managed – can rapidly result in acute illness and admission to hospital. A better, community-based, preventive approach to managing people with frailty is based on case-finding, followed by care that is appropriate to the individual, whether it is supported self-management, personalised care and support planning, or end-of-life care.
Understanding frailty as a long-term condition
A commonly heard clinical expression is “He/she is very frail”. It provides a summary statement of an older person that implies concerns over vulnerability and prognosis. This is how we have conventionally considered frailty—as a descriptive label: ‘the frail elderly’. In this article, we will re-frame frailty in a potentially more helpful way. We will examine frailty from the perspective of an abnormal health state that behaves just like a long-term condition. This conceptualisation of frailty opens up new approaches to helping people who are frail.
Introduction to frailty
Frailty is a distinctive health state related to the ageing process in which multiple body systems gradually lose their in-built reserves. This means the person is vulnerable to dramatic, sudden changes in health triggered by seemingly small events such as a minor infection or a change in medication.
