Following on from the publication of the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Dissemination Centre ‘Comprehensive Care: Older people living with frailty’ themed review in 2017, the Wessex Acute Frailty Audit looks at the standard of care that is provided for a person living with frailty in our local acute hospitals.
The project was run by the Wessex Academic Health Science Network (AHSN) in collaboration with 8 acute trusts (covering 9 hospital sites) and a community hospital (which has some acute beds) to gain a regional understanding of care provision. The audit aimed to identify areas of good practice and also significant gaps in frailty identification, personalised assessment and care planning, and hospital wide provision of frailty training with an overall aim to regionally drive up standards of care and improve patient outcomes.
The audit and subsequent workshop identified gaps in frailty service provision and opportunities for service improvement across Wessex. Two working groups have been convened by the Wessex AHSN Healthy Ageing programme as a result of the audit outcomes.
Planned outputs from clinically led working groups include:
The development and completion of the audit has also enabled the following opportunities:
The Healthy Ageing Programme plan to re-audit acute trusts in 2021 which will enable measurement of improvement from the baseline audit in 2018. Please visit https://wessexahsn.org.uk/projects/346/wessex-acute-frailty-audit-autumn-2021 for more details.