Frailty in Community-Dwelling Older People: Second Edition

A special issue of Healthcare (ISSN 2227-9032). This special issue belongs to the section "Community Care".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 May 2024 | Viewed by 1169

Special Issue Editor


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Guest Editor
Faculty of Health, Sports and Social Work, Inholland University of Applied Sciences, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Interests: nursing; quality of life; gerontology; patient education; geriatric; nursing instrument development; geriatric assessment; geriatric psychiatry; medication adherence; aging research; elderly; questionnaire design
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Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

With a growing geriatric population worldwide, frailty is becoming an increasingly important topic because it is often closely related to aging. To address the challenges resulting from the aging population, services and policies are increasingly focused on independently living in the community rather than relying on institutions, e.g., nursing homes. This fits the wishes of many older people, who prefer to stay in their own homes for as long as possible.

However, frail older people living independently in the community have a high risk of adverse outcomes such as lower quality of life and disability and an increase in healthcare utilization (e.g., hospitalization and institutionalization) and mortality. Therefore, it is important to identify frail community-dwelling older people as early as possible and to implement interventions that can prevent or delay poor outcomes. Therefore, it is important that we gain more knowledge about the assessment of frailty, determinants of frailty, the associations between frailty and adverse outcomes, perspectives of healthcare professionals on frailty (e.g., general practitioners and nurses, ), and, most importantly, how to prevent frailty or poor outcomes. For example, we still lack knowledge on which interventions can prevent physical, psychological, and social frailty.

This Special Issue of Healthcare seeks commentaries, original research, short reports, and reviews on frailty in community-dwelling older people. Both contributions based on quantitative and qualitative research can be submitted.

Prof. Dr. Robbert Gobbens
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Healthcare is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • frailty
  • community-dwelling older people
  • primary care
  • prevention
  • disability
  • quality of life
  • healthcare utilization
  • mortality
  • measurement
  • determinants

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Review

14 pages, 1919 KiB  
Review
What If the Clinical and Older Adults’ Perspectives about Frailty Converge? A Call for a Mixed Conceptual Model of Frailty: A Traditional Literature Review
by Asya Hani Khalil and Robbert J. J. Gobbens
Healthcare 2023, 11(24), 3174; https://doi.org/10.3390/healthcare11243174 - 15 Dec 2023
Viewed by 928
Abstract
Existing frailty models have enhanced research and practice; however, none of the models accounts for the perspective of older adults upon defining and operationalizing frailty. We aim to propose a mixed conceptual model that builds on the integral model while accounting for older [...] Read more.
Existing frailty models have enhanced research and practice; however, none of the models accounts for the perspective of older adults upon defining and operationalizing frailty. We aim to propose a mixed conceptual model that builds on the integral model while accounting for older adults’ perceptions and lived experiences of frailty. We conducted a traditional literature review to address frailty attributes, risk factors, consequences, perceptions, and lived experiences of older adults with frailty. Frailty attributes are vulnerability/susceptibility, aging, dynamic, complex, physical, psychological, and social. Frailty perceptions and lived experience themes/subthemes are refusing frailty labeling, being labeled “by others” as compared to “self-labeling”, from the perception of being frail towards acting as being frail, positive self-image, skepticism about frailty screening, communicating the term “frail”, and negative and positive impacts and experiences of frailty. Frailty risk factors are classified into socio-demographic, biological, physical, psychological/cognitive, behavioral, and situational/environmental factors. The consequences of frailty affect the individual, the caregiver/family, the healthcare sector, and society. The mixed conceptual model of frailty consists of interacting risk factors, interacting attributes surrounded by the older adult’s perception and lived experience, and interacting consequences at multiple levels. The mixed conceptual model provides a lens to qualify frailty in addition to quantifying it. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Frailty in Community-Dwelling Older People: Second Edition)
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