Prevalence and outcomes

This program is the first of its kind —globally — to focus on evaluating frailty in hospitals at a large scale. Our aim is to quantify the prevalence of frailty and establish frailty-related outcomes and costs.

This program strives to provide a comprehensive understanding of the prevalence, impact, and resource utilisation of frailty in hospital patients.

Until now, frailty estimates in Australia have been limited to small, service-specific cohorts. Larger scale studies have relied on risk scores, which are based on data not directly linked to frailty. Our objectives include a systematic analysis of the prevalence of frailty in a large and representative inpatient population and to quantify the impact of frailty on healthcare expenditure and resource utilisation.

We distinguish the prevalence of frailty by age, sex, hospital, service, and cause of admission. We link frailty with outcomes in hospitals, including falls, delirium, pressure injuries, adverse drug events, length of stay, and death. One year after discharge, we examine frailty outcomes, including discharge destination, readmission (and cause), and mortality (and cause).

Thanks to the CRE funding, we can upscale our analyses to 70,000 patients per year in NSW. These analyses will provide, for the first time, a comprehensive understanding of the prevalence and impact of frailty in acute care settings. They will also quantify the resource implications of frailty in hospital patients.

This research program is led by Professor Sarah Hilmer and Professor Kirsten Howard at the University of Sydney.