Acute-Care Frailty Ladder

Read more about the project here.

Hospital care for an elderly person, either as an out- or in-patient, indicates a complex health condition that may put the senior at risk for developing or aggravating frailty and subsequently progressing to potentially irreversible functional impairments, limitations and restrictions.

Hospital care is also an opportunity to identify frailty and to provide interventions and services to reverse or delay progression. However, none of the many frailty indices or “measures” currently available is ideal for deployment in the busy hospital setting and none would meet modern robust psychometric standards for creating legitimate total scores.

Nancy Mayo, MSc, PhD is a James McGill Professor in the Department of Medicine and the School of Physical and Occupational Therapy, McGill University (Division of Geriatrics and Division of Clinical Epidemiology).  She is also a Research Scientist at the Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation at McGill University Hospital Center Research Institute where she leads a research program on Function, Disability and Quality of Life for vulnerable populations.  Trained originally as a Physical Therapist, Dr. Mayo holds a PhD in Epidemiology and Biostatistics.  Her research focus has been in measuring the health of populations with or at risk for disability, transient or permanent, and in contributing evidence towards ways of improving health outcomes of these vulnerable populations.