Background: Frailty assessment is recommended for patients with heart failure. Despite the availability of instruments to assess frailty, there are no clear recommendations regarding the optimal instrument to use in a heart failure context. This ambiguity combined with a lack of education and resources, often leads clinicians to rely on subjective estimates of frailty, such as ‘the end-of-the-bed’ or ‘eyeball’ test. Aim: To examine the association between clinician-estimated frailty and formal frailty assessment in adults with heart failure. Methods: Cross-sectional analysis of the FRAilty MEasurement in Heart Failure (FRAME-HF) study. Participants: (1) Adults aged ≥18 years in the outpatient heart failure clinic and cardiology ward; (2) and cardiovascular clinicians (nurses, physicians, and allied-health professionals). Following participant recruitment, cardiovascular clinicians were asked to rate the participant's frailty status based on their routine clinical assessm
Background: Overtreatment in advanced age i.e. aggressive interventions that do not improve survival and are potentially harmful, can impair quality of care near the end of life (EOL). As healthcare provider perspectives on care quality may differ from that of service users, the aim of this study was to explore the views of older patients near EOL or their caregivers about the quality of health care at the EOL based on their lived experience, and to identify healthcare service improvements. Methods: Medline and backward citation searches were conducted for qualitative or quantitative studies reported on the views of patients and/or informal caregivers about EOL care quality. Thematic analysis was used to summarise qualitative data (primary analysis); narrative and tabulations were used to summarise quantitative data (secondary analysis). Results: Thirty articles met the inclusion criteria. Five main qualitative themes regarding quality care emerged: (1) Effective communication between