The nursing home frailty scale: an efficient approach to assessing frailty in long-term care

Frailty among residents of long-term care facilities (LTCFs) is associated with adverse events such as falls, weight loss, functional decline, hospitalization, and death. Thus, a need exists for a comprehensive scale to identify LTCF residents who are frail, with the goal of improving residents’ recovery. This article describes a project to develop and test a scale to meet this need. The Nursing Home Frailty Scale was developed from a national cohort of US nursing home residents with data collected as part of the Minimum Data Set and with death, hospitalization, and clinical judgment of proximity of death as dependent measures. The resulting 21-item frailty scale represents an efficient and cost-effective approach to monitoring frailty in LTCFs.