Comparison of Three Frailty Screening Tools

Summary

Participation Requirements

Description

This is a prospective study with six month follow-up among community-dwelling elderly aged 65 or older. Agreement between instruments, Frail state transition changes, feasibility, internal consistency, concurrent and predictive validity, convergent validity of instruments will be evaluated and compa...

This is a prospective study with six month follow-up among community-dwelling elderly aged 65 or older. Agreement between instruments, Frail state transition changes, feasibility, internal consistency, concurrent and predictive validity, convergent validity of instruments will be evaluated and compared. The participants' recruitment strategies will be through referrals by the personnel in outpatient department in a hospital, community care centers, health centers, C tiers of community care service system, love angel stations etc. We focused on three available instruments based on literature review and expert opinions for community-dwelling elderly care: Kihon Checklist (KCL), Study of Osteoporotic Fractures (SOF), and frailty phenotype (FP) screening tools. Using G-power3.1 for sample size estimation, 80 subjects will be needed. Based on the estimated loss rate is 30%, so 110 participants need to be recruited. The screening sequence of this research will carry out with the Randomization block. There are six sequence combinations with three frailty screening tools. The researcher read the questionnaire one by one item, and then will fill the participants' answers into the data collection sheets. The physical function test is performed by the researcher. This study was approved by the institutional Review Board. All participants will be asked to complete written informed consent. The statistical method adopts multivariate repeated measure analysis to detect the transition of frailty state. The area under the curve (AUC) will be used to examine the predictive ability on body function (grip strength, walking speed) and negative outcomes (falls, hospitalization) of the three frailty screening tools. The anticipated benefits of this study will include (1) clinical practice: provide the screening time, completion rate, reliability and validity of the frailty screening tools to clinical health care professionals with reference to the selection of frailty screening tools for the community-dwelling elderly. Predicting the cut-off point of screening for falls or institutionalization/hospitalization of elderly people in the community can be used in nursing clinical practice to explain the screening results and risk assessment of falls and hospitalization to patients to prevent or delay the frailty progress. (2) academic research: provide a six-month observation of the changes in the frailty status of the elderly in the community in Taiwan, increase the understanding of the frailty transition of the elderly in the community, and identify frailty screening tools that have better prediction of physical functions and negative results. (3) National development: The results of this study are provided to the government as a reference for optimizing Taiwan's long-term care 2.0 policy formulation.

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