The award winning Frailty and Elderly Care research group addresses the needs of an ageing population. This population has life-long accumulated exposures which contribute to chronic disease and give rise to associated physical and mental health co-morbidities. In response to the health service challenges posed by multi-morbidity in the elderly, our research encompasses:
- The nature of frailty in the elderly and its impact on service use.
- Mental health morbidity (delirium, dementia, depression) in physical healthcare settings.
- Evaluation of services for older people, for example community hospitals, day hospitals and intermediate care.
We are a national and international leading centre for frailty research. The development of the Electronic Frailty Index (eFI) led by Andy Clegg, allowing for the first time identification of people with frailty through routine data, has been transformational. Use of the eFI is now in the new General Medical Services contract, a contractual requirement for practices to screen for frailty, allowing them to identify and consider offering treatment options to their frail elderly patients. The eFI, winner of the RCP Excellence in Patient Care Awards 2017, also featured in the 2016 NICE Multimorbidity Guideline, is being used by numerous research teams to identify people with frailty in order to develop tailored services, technology and interventions.
Our recent projects include:
- A study to understand and optimise community hospital care in the NHS (MOCHA)
- Personalised Care Planning for Older People with Frailty (PROSPER)
- The Community Ageing Research Study (CARE 75+)
- Home-based Extended Rehabilitation for Older people (HERO)
- Optimising blood pressure management for older people with frailty
- Medical day hospital care for the elderly versus alternative forms of care
- Developing a novel system of care targeting risk factors for five manifestations of frailty to maintain the independence of older people in hospital and post-discharge (OPTIMISE)
- Community-based complex interventions to sustain independence in older people
- Enabling health and maintaining independence for older people at home: the ‘HomeHealth’ trial
- Pain in Older PeoPle with FrailtY – The POPPY Study