Exploring Frailty: Community Physical and Occupational Therapists’ Perspectives

ABSTRACT

Frailty is prevalent among community-dwelling older adults. Community physical and occupational therapists provide at-home care to older adults, yet little is known about their ability to identify frailty, specifically the early development (pre-frailty). Objectives: To explore therapists’ perspectives on frailty, and develop a definition of how they view and manage frailty in their practice. Eleven therapists (17.3 ± 12.0 years of experience) completed repertory grid-guided interviews. Principal component analysis identified relationships in data and highlighted themes, and constant comparative analysis built upon emerging themes. Therapists recognized frailty as self-imposed isolation due to reduced motivation, lack of safe judgment, and declining physical fitness resulting in functional dependence. Therapists’ image of frailty included deterioration of physical, mental, and social capacities, leading to an inability to thrive. Therapists recognized that the underlying comorbidities contributed to the unique expression of frailty within individual clients. Therapists’ distinct perspectives of frailty add to current proposed definitions by establishing early identifiers to enable an effective and useable definition of “what is frail?”

KEYWORDS. :

• community-based care
• social isolation
• repertory grid