Improving frailty care

Evaluating the transformation of frailty care pathways in England.

What is the issue?

Caregiver talking to an elderly woman in a wheelchair

Photo by by ReeseArcurs/peopleimages.com/Adobe Stock

NHS England has been working to provide better care for people living with frailty, including by joining up health services with social care. Primarily affecting older adults, frailty is a state that makes it more difficult for people to recover from physical injuries or illnesses, resulting in a higher risk of poorer outcomes, disability or death. In England, one in ten people aged 65 years or older and one in five people aged 80 years or older live with frailty. Women are more likely to develop frailty, as are those with multiple long-term health conditions, those who smoke, or those who have obesity or are underweight.

As the population in England, and the UK more broadly, becomes older, the number of people living with frailty will also increase, as will the costs of caring for this population. Given this, addressing the health and social care needs of people living with frailty is very important.

How are we helping?

On behalf of NHS England, RAND Europe, in partnership with the University of Cambridge, is undertaking a process evaluation to understand whether and how clinical care pathways are being improved across England to promote better access, quality and cost of frailty care. The evaluation will attempt to understand how this might work and assess whether it would be possible to carry out a future study to understand the impacts of these services.

Over 18 months, we will use both quantitative and qualitative methods, including desk-based research, analysis of routine healthcare data, interviews with stakeholders involved in the provision of health and social care, and focus groups with older people living with frailty and/or their carers. From this work, we will develop five case studies showing how efforts to improve frailty care work in practice.

This work is funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research, as part of the Cambridge and RAND Europe National Evaluation Team, a collaboration between The Health Care Improvement Studies (THiS) Institute at the University of Cambridge and RAND Europe.