Older people

After Covid-19, the need is even greater to impact the lives of individuals living with frailty ensuring they age well and stay independent at home for longer. We have worked in collaboration with our healthy ageing experts, regional and national colleagues to support systems to transform frailty services, help the development and adoption of best practice approaches, and champion ageing well digital and service innovations. We’ve continued to deliver service transformation toolkits, e-learning and resources for the NHS and social care in the past year.

What was delivered in 2021-22? 

• We scoped, developed and launched three frailty toolkits to support health and care staff working with individuals living with frailty, their families and carers to deliver optimal care and services.

• Delivered the 2021 Wessex Acute Frailty Audit to all Wessex acute trusts, covering nine hospital sites and one community hospital.

• Engaged with 20 organisations across Wessex to support related innovations enabling transformation of care for people living with frailty.

• Successfully launched and enabled spread and adoption of the frailty e-learning module: accessible across all 4 UK nations, with 8,725 enrolments and 21,172 launches, and downloaded into the e-learning systems of 63% of Wessex trusts.

• Supported the NIHR Applied Research Collaborative (ARC) Wessex application for a project to evaluate digital remote monitoring for people living with frailty in the community, achieving funding of £271,250.

• Promoted the spread and adoption of best practice across Wessex, regional and national networks

                - Comprehensive Geriatric Assessment

                - Urgent Community Response (UCR) frailty models.

• Continued spread and uptake of the Hydration at Home toolkit.

• Built national, regional NHS and social care recognition of the Healthy Ageing programme.

• Grew engagement and collaboration with the voluntary sector.

• Published Nutrition Wheel case study on the Beneficial Change Network forum, detailing the development of this interactive tool to identify malnutrition in older people in the community.