Wessex Acute Frailty Audit Autumn 2021

Launch of insights into sharing frailty information report February 2023

High level summary

Building on our the findings from from the 2018 and 2021 Wessex Acute Frailty Audits the insights into sharing of frailty information report across Wessex provides a firm evidence base 

demonstrating the need for cultural, humanistic support alongside digital transformation; and

demonstrating emergent best practice.

Take a look at our final report and suite of infographics to help health and care professionals understand the importance of sharing of frailty information and useful hints and tips to support innovative digital transformation for organisations and integrated care systems and boards.

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Background

Building on the Wessex AHSN Healthy Ageing 2018 and 2021 Wessex Acute Frailty Audits findings, which clearly identified, the need to articulate the opportunities and barriers of sharing frailty information e.g. clinical frailty scores and comprehensive geriatric assessments across Wessex:

• across and within organisational boundaries and staff groups
• sharing with external organisations and settings and;
• patients and carers

The Insights into sharing of frailty information across Wessex report has been produced by the Healthy Ageing Programme to help local partners in understanding the complex, local digital landscape and to help us to understand where we, as a Programme, can add further value and innovation support.

Why is sharing of frailty information so important?

Our approach

We undertook onsite visits and undertook virtual interviews to map examples from acute, primary, community and care to identify opportunities and barriers to sharing frailty information into a series of infographics, best practice and hints and tips.

The insight report includes:

• Understanding the wider Wessex digital strategical context and how the sharing of frailty information feeds into this
• Understanding from an acute, primary, community and care perspective what are the opportunities and benefits in sharing frailty information within and across organisations and settings 

• Identifying known issues in sharing information within and outside of organisations
• Identifying of innovative plans to resolve known issues
• Identifying best practice case studies for spread, adoption and knowledge sharing

• Promoting the importance of sharing of information for patient-centred care

Perceived benefits of this insight work:

• Informing digital transformation planning across Wessex
• Supporting broader ICS’ frailty agenda service innovations including frailty virtual wards

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The Healthy Ageing programme successfully delivered the 2021 Wessex Acute Frailty Audit with 100% of trusts engaged with the audit. During March 2022, the programme facilitated a series of interactive events and workshops with our local acute trusts to put the audit findings into action. This combined with the collaboration with the NHS Benchmarking network enabled our collaborators to fully understand their benchmarking data, resulting in the identification of 24 organisational service improvement projects. 4 common themes were discussed during the sessions and included:

1. Exploration of innovative ways of developing and upskilling the frailty workforce
2. Identification of new models of care e.g sharing and reviewing experiences of new models of care that have been implemented
3. Sharing of information e.g Comprehensive Geriatric Assessments, screening within organisations and with system partners
4. Exploration of integrated frailty virtual wards to understand the art of the possible and areas of support and opportunity.

Why did we co-ordinate the 2021 Wessex Acute Frailty Audit?

Following the success of the 2018 Wessex Acute Frailty Audit (WAFA), the Healthy Ageing Programme had been fully committed in re-running the audit on a bi-annual basis. 

In April 2021, a clinical working group was convened to review and streamline the audit in the light of the impact that Covid-19 has had across our local systems. 

The 2021 WAFA, launched in August 2021, aimed to:

1. Understand changes to frailty services resulting from Covid-19, e.g frailty virtual wards
2. Identify new innovative projects
3. Review progress of frailty screening and frailty education implementation (from 2018 audit) 
4. Baseline the position ready for the launch and spread of the Wessex AHSN Comprehensive Geriatric Assessment recommendations and implementation toolkit 
5. Link outputs from the NHS Benchmarking Network return, 'Managing frailty in an acute setting'.

The WAFA was open to acute trusts until November 2021, analysis alongside a commissioned NHS Benchmarking Network report took place during December 2021 - February 2022, resulting in the with the publication of the WAFA and NHS Benchmarking Network results shared in March 2022.

In March 2022, the programme delivered a suite of virtual and face to face events in collaboration with the NHS Benchmarking Network and our trust and system partners, to review the audit results and to identify 1-2 innovative projects for delivery 2022/23.