Capturing the voices of lived experience of older people with frailty and their carers, combined with the expertise of community nurses.

Frailty is a term used to describe how our bodies gradually lose their in-built reserves as we age. This may mean that we do not bounce back from an illness as quickly as we would have before. Frailty affects around 1 in 10 people aged over 65 years in the community and around half of people aged over 85 years. Preventing and managing frailty in the community is a new area for many practitioners yet frailty specific education remains limited.

This two year project is a collaboration between the ALLIANCE, University of the West of Scotland (this link will take you away from our website), NHS Ayrshire and Arran (this link will take you away from our website), International Foundation for Integrated Care (this link will take you away from our website), Queens Nursing Institute Scotland (this link will take you away from our website) and was funded by Burdett Trust for Nursing (this link will take you away from  our website). Meet the Frailty Matters research project team.

The project aimed to understand and support the role of community nurses in leading personalised care for older people with frailty. Together we co-produced and delivered an innovative coaching and education programme with support from co-coaches who have experience of living with frailty. The educational blogs can be viewed at Frailty Matters (this link will take you away from our website).

The co-produced educational framework was inspired by Scotland’s House of Care – a well established person centred framework for collaborative care and support planning for people with long term conditions.  We hope that our ‘Frailty House’ offers an accessible and intuitive framework to highlight the knowledge base and the person centred coaching and leadership skills required to support older people to live well with frailty in the community.

The two year project concluded in August 2021. The project team are sharing their learning through a series of workshops, blogs, presentations and reports. You can access these here.

For more information, please contact mandy.andrew@alliance-scotland.org.uk (this link will take you away from our website).