Frailty in Community-Dwelling Older People

Dear Colleagues,

With a growing geriatric population worldwide, frailty is becoming an increasingly important topic, because frailty is often closely related to aging. To deal with 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 for adverse outcomes such as lower quality of life, disability, 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

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