Frailty amongst people experiencing homelessness

Frail older people have a high risk of poor health outcomes. GPs are encouraged to identify those who are moderate-severely frail and provide personalised care.

The electronic frailty index (eFI) supports this, but has limitations, including insufficient attention to mental health and time-varying conditions.

This project set out to improve the eFI’s clinical utility: to determine the best combination of mental health variables to predict frailty outcomes, and also to optimise time-dependent variables.

As a result, we have developed and validated an improved version of the electronic frailty index (eFI2) to identify individuals at risk of frailty using data from their healthcare records.

The team has been working closely with software providers for GP computing systems (EMIS, SystmOne) to implement this nationally, replacing the original eFI, and has also engaged NHS England with these changes.  The eFI2 will enable better discrimination and targeting of resources for frailty.

NHS Find and Treat