Frailty and Nutrition Risk Screening in Home-Delivered Meal Clients

Abstract

Community service providers, such as Meals on Wheels (MOW) programs, help older adults remain in their homes despite advanced care needs. The purpose of this study was to determine if a frailty index (FI) could be calculated from self-reported health, function, and nutrition information already collected by MOW providers to provide additional information for care planning and risk stratification. Data from 258 MOW clients at one provider were used to calculate the FI from 40 possible health and age-related variables collected during routine health assessments. The average FI was 0.29 ± 0.13(SD), range 0.05–0.68. Frailty was categorized as non-frail, vulnerable, frail, and most frail; nutrition risk increased incrementally with these categories; however, they appear to assess risk from differing angles and etiologies. The addition of the FI can provide a more holistic picture of MOW client health than nutrition risk alone and the FI can be calculated from routinely-collected data.

Keywords:

• Frailty
• Homebound older adults
• home-delivered meals
• meals on wheels
• nutrition risk

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to the staff and clients of Ypsilanti Meals on Wheels, without whom this study would not have been possible. We also thank Grigoris Argeros for valuable feedback on our data analysis plan.

Disclosure statement

The authors have no potential conflicts of interest to report.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported in part by a Summer Research Award (HHW) from Eastern Michigan University.