Authors' recommendations: • 70.6 % of the authors do not create their own concept, they use another author’s definition. There is no agreement regarding the concept of frailty.• From the clinical practice perspective, definitions can be sorted out into two groups:• On the one hand, those which define the frail old person through biomedical factors (proposed by Fried 2001)• On the other hand, there are more holistic definitions like the one offered by Rockwood 1994, in which psychosocial and environmental factors were included. They improved exhaustivity but lost speed. • Multiple variables were found regarding the indicators/markers used in the identification of frailty, and no evidence has been found to consider any of them the right indicator to allow diagnosing frailty in the old person.• There is no validated tool which identifies frailty, although it is possible to set out possible predictors into 16 categories. This could provide us with the criteria for diagnosing frailty.• There is a common element among the different units forming the health care system in our country and it is the achievement of better outcomes with a specialized team in geriatric care, coordination between the hospital and the community members levels and the organization with standardised procedures, together with the active participation of the medical staff (adequate decision tools).• The concept of frailty is different for experts involved in caring for the elderly, primary healthcare and palliative care (also including the medical and nursing staff). They considered a frail old person as someone suffering functional disorders and death risk, and frailty as death risk. However, specialists in internal medicine considered frailty as the risk to suffer functional disorders as well as the loss of abilities to continue being independent.

Project Status: Completed

URL for project: https://www.aetsa.org/publicacion/desarrollo-de-criterios-indicadores-de-complejidad-y-estrategias-de-manejo-en-fragilidad/

Year Published: 2009

URL for published report: https://www.aetsa.org/download/publicaciones/antiguas/AETSA_2007-03_Fragilidad.pdf

English language abstract: An English language summary is available

Publication Type: Not Assigned

Country: Spain

Organisation Name: Andalusian Health Technology Assessment Area

Contact Address: Area de Evaluacion de Tecnologias Sanitarias Sanitarias de Andalucia (AETSA) Avda. Innovación, s/n Edificio Arena 1. Sevilla (Spain) Tel. +34 955 006 309

Contact Name: aetsa.csalud@juntadeandalucia.es

Contact Email: aetsa.csalud@juntadeandalucia.es

Copyright: Andalusian Agency for Health Technology Assessment (AETSA)