182Prevalence of Frailty in Older Adults Referred to Primary Care Physiotherapy and the Influence of Frailty Screening on Physiotherapy Practice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Frailty prevalence among community-dwelling older adults is estimated at 10.7% and is expected to increase with population ageing (Collard et al., 2012). Physiotherapy is a heavily utilised Primary Care service by older adults (McNamara et al., 2013). However, frailty prevalence among older adults referred to Primary Care physiotherapy in Ireland is not known. Screening tools, such as the Edmonton Frail Scale (EFS) are useful for identifying frailty, however, there is a lack of research on whether they inform clinical practice. Methods: A mixed methods study was undertaken. An observational cross-sectional study of older adults referred to an Irish Primary Care physiotherapy service was conducted. Frailty prevalence was identified from EFS scores as assessed by physiotherapists. A qualitative study, using focus group interviews and thematic analysis, explored the perspectives of Primary Care physiotherapists on frailty screening. Results: One hundred older adults were screened with the EFS, with a mean age of 80.3 (±7.4) years. The prevalence (95%CI) of mild, moderate and severe frailty was 22% (15–30%), 13% (7–22%) and 8% (3–14%), respectively; 26% (18–36%) were ‘vulnerable’ and 31% (22–40%) were ‘non-frail’. Focus group interviews of physiotherapists (n = 8), highlighted a need for an integrated care pathway and multidisciplinary approach to frailty. The EFS enhanced physiotherapists’ holistic care of older adults, identification of cognitive frailty and communication with the multidisciplinary team and family of older adults. Conclusion: The prevalence of frailty is higher in older adults referred to Primary Care physiotherapy than the general community-dwelling older adult population. The EFS is acceptable to physiotherapists and facilitates early identification of frailty. Further research is required into multidisciplinary frailty screening and pathways for the management of frailty in the Primary Care setting.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".