Development and Validation of a Screening Tool for Social Frailty in Older People
We aim to help health and care workers identify ‘social frailty’ through a tested tool supporting preventive action.
Research Team
- Professor Martin Webber
- Professor Lynette Joubert
- Dr. Mark Wilberforce
- Dr. Kyle Schwartz
- Professor Barbara Hanratty
- Dr. David Sinclair
- Dr. Jennifer Liddle
- Dr. Louise Tomkow
- Dawn Sissons
- Jess Goldthorp
- Rashmi Kumar
- Pip Harkness
Project Summary
Background
Most people prefer to live in their own homes as they age. To support this, health and social care services need to have a broad understanding of people's lives. Too often, professionals do not look beyond the diagnosis or problem in front of them. This proposal introduces the idea of ‘social frailty’ as a way of improving care of older people by helping care professionals to have a shared, broad view of older people’s needs. Currently, frailty is a term used in medicine to describe the ageing body’s inability to bounce back after an illness or shock. ‘Social frailty’ describes a situation where an older person is at risk of losing the things that help them stay connected and involved with others. These could include resources (e.g. friends or family), or social activities (like going out or taking part in groups). We have found 43 different tools that measure 11 different aspects of ‘social frailty.’ There is little common ground across them and none are used in routine practice in the UK.
Aims
In this project, we will combine the ideas of frailty and social frailty to develop a tool and a language of frailty that is shared across health and social care. Our aim is to support preventive action, by creating and testing a way for health and social care workers to identify people with ‘social frailty.’ This will include a brief set of questions to detect ‘social frailty’ and a longer set of questions to help professionals identify how best to respond to people who might need extra and diverse support in their lives.
Methods
Our lived experience and practitioner advisory groups will work with the research team to decide which questions, and aspects of ‘social frailty’, to include in the measures. These will come from measures and questions used in other large studies of older people. We will also consult with experts to agree which questions to use. We will then ask health and social care workers to use the questions in their work to see if they correctly identify ‘social frailty’ in a variety of different settings. We will analyse data from a large interview study (the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing) to test if these questions – or very similar ones – predict poor health or shortened life.
We will develop and share some guidance about how professionals can use the new measures in their work to detect ‘social frailty’, and plan how best to respond, in order to prevent things getting worse for people. In future studies we will establish the best approaches or services that can meet these needs and help older people to stay independent for as long as possible.