Exploring Nursing Interventions for Frail Individuals in Primary Care: A Systematic Review.
Marta Del Moral-Pairada, Cristina Laserna Jiménez, Núria Fabrellas and 1 others
PMID 40536354WHAT IT FOUND
Nurse-led home assessments for frail older adults showed little clear improvement in quality of life or disability, but trust, coordination, pain checks, and fall risk assessment were central.
Key findings
01Nurse-led comprehensive geriatric assessment in the home was the most common intervention across the included studies.
02In nurse-led home-care trials, quality of life was generally not significantly different from usual care, while disability findings were mixed.
03Frail older adults described feeling disconnected, and nurses were seen as trusted bridges to services when working in the home.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for RNs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The included studies were too heterogeneous for meta-analysis. Few studies reported interventions conducted independently by nurses. Frailty may not be consistently identified by the term used in the search. Several included studies had incomplete descriptions of randomisation, blinding, confounding, sample size, or outcomes. The review excluded nursing home residents, daycare centres, inpatients, multidisciplinary teams, other professionals, students, and caregivers, so it does not describe care in those settings or by those teams. The age at which frailty screening began varied from 60 to 80 years.
Declared interests
The authors declared no conflict of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that nurse-led home CGA improves frail older adults' quality of life or disability. The trials mostly reported no significant difference from usual care, and the review could not combine the studies because they were too heterogeneous.