Frail+LD

Helping identify frailty risks earlier in people with learning disabilities

Frail+LD is a clinical decision support tool that sets out to identify frailty risk sooner across health and social care settings.

The tool has been created and developed in line with LeDeR and NICE recommendations for individualised assessment of frailty, with consideration of multimorbidity and underlying health conditions. The tool is based on the Rockwood Clinical Frailty Scale (CFS) but further developed with the consideration of comorbidity and health conditions as the CFS is not recommended for people living with learning disabilities¹.

Eastern AHSN are supporting a pilot with Hertfordshire County Council and Hertfordshire Community NHS Trust with support from the University of Hertfordshire to validate Frail+LD. We are providing funding for an independent evaluation of this tool which is due in March 2023. The anticipated outcome of this project is an improvement in the health and wellbeing of people living with learning disabilities.

“People with learning disabilities have a similar risk of falls throughout their lives as older people in the general population. Around one-third of falls by people with learning disabilities result in injury and the rate of fractures is higher than in the rest of the population. This may be due to increased risk of osteoporosis” – Public Health England, ‘Preventing falls in people with learning disabilities: making reasonable adjustments‘, 2019

References:

[1] https://www.pulsetoday.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/c_files/uploads/a/l/a/C0166-Letter-DNACPR.pdf