Frailty is common in critically ill elderly patients, and is associated with adverse impacts on outcomes and is becoming increasingly common in Intensive Care Unit (ICU) populations. However it is not clear as to how to best measure frailty and when to do so. It is also not clear as to how processes of care impact on the outcomes observed. We hypothesize that frailty in survivors of critical illness will be measurable at hospital discharge, will correlate with processes of care while in ICU and will better discriminate long term outcomes when compared to severity of illness or the degree of frailty present on ICU admission.
A prospective observational study of critically ill patients over the age of 50, studying the occurrence of frailty as measured by a variety of frailty measures, processes of care and long term outcomes.