The national evaluation of frailty care pathways
Background
Frailty is a condition that reduces a person’s ability to recover from illness or injury, increasing their risk of disability, hospital admission, and death. It affects around one in ten people aged 65 years and over, rising to one in five people aged 80 and over. Frailty is more common among women, people living with multiple long-term conditions, people who smoke, and people who are underweight or living with obesity.
NHS England has been developing “frailty care pathways” that bring together health and social care services to provide coordinated, proactive, and person-centred support for people living with frailty. The aim is to help people maintain their independence for longer, reduce avoidable hospital admissions, improve experiences of care, and deliver more joined-up care closer to home.
While many of these pathways are already being implemented across England, there is limited evidence about what works best. This makes it challenging for national and local decision-makers to plan, commission, and invest in frailty services with confidence.
Approach
We’re working in collaboration with RAND Europe to carry out an 18-month process evaluation of efforts to optimise frailty care pathways across England. This independent evaluation aims to understand how frailty care pathways are being designed, implemented, and experienced, and to identify the factors that support or hinder their successful delivery.
The evaluation will explore what helps to make frailty care pathways work well, and will involve desk-based research, routine data analysis, and interviews with health and care stakeholders, as well as focus groups with people living with frailty and their carers.
Findings will be used to develop case studies to show how efforts to improve frailty care are being implemented in practice. The study will also assess whether a future evaluation of the impact of frailty care pathways on health and wellbeing, the quality of care, and the costs is feasible.
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Funding and ethics
CARE-NET is funded by the NIHR Health and Social Care Delivery Research (HSDR) Programme (HSDR Project: NIHR164029 – The Cambridge and RAND Europe National Evaluation Team (CARE-NET)).
Related links
https://www.thisinstitute.cam.ac.uk/research/projects/acute-respiratory-infection-hubs/