FRailty Among Elderly Emergency Department Patients With Outcome Measures

FRailty Among Elderly Emergency Department Patients With Outcome Measures

Our study aims to compare 4 clinical frailty scores, namely Clinical Frailty Scale (CFS), Edmonton Frail Scale (EFS), FRAIL 5-item scale (FRAIL) and SARC-F Sarcopenia Score (SARC-F), which can potentially be adopted for daily practice in the busy ED. It is timely as we projected that we will be seeing more elderly patients attending the ED for various medical and surgical conditions. Their attendance at the ED would be a good opportunity to screen for frailty among them, and to intervene to prevent adverse outcomes such as ED re-attendance or subsequent hospitalisation that might lead to poor functional outcomes and higher dependence on step-down care facilities.

Inclusion Criteria:

- Elderly patients aged 65 years and above attending ED irrespective of reason for attendance.

Exclusion Criteria:

• Haemodynamically unstable patients
• Inability to obtain informed consent
• Inability to obtain reliable information from patient or caregiver (e.g. deafness, blindness, language barriers)
• Vulnerable populations (e.g. prisoners)
• Patients who are planned for hospital admission from the ED