SCFN Toolkit

The SCFN is very pleased to share a revised edition of the Specialised Clinical Frailty Toolkit, building on the learning made with our sites in Waves Three and Four. By making frailty ‘everybody’s business’ in specialised services, care for older people who are frail should be significantly improved. The aim of this Toolkit is to develop the most appropriate pathways for frail patients in specialised services and to get the best outcomes possible for them.

This Toolkit is for anyone involved in the design or delivery of specialised services, working with older people with frailty. You will find the guide useful if you are a clinician, manager, administrator, commissioner, information analyst or healthcare student. We hope the resources collated in this guide help inspire other specialised service teams to improve their services for the frailer individual, as the examples included can be broadened to other service pathways, including those that involve the delivery of more complex care.

We have have also created a range of fully customisable packages to support frontline teams adopt the SCFN Toolkit, and to improve pathways in specialised services for older people living with frailty. A variety of package options are available and you can select from this list or talk to us about a combination of elements. Further information is available here.

The Rockwood Clinical Frailty Scale, Professor Ken Rockwood, Dalhousie University
(Professor Rockwood’s team are happy to share the CFS for noncommercial, educational, clinical and research use. To guard against copyright infringement or unlicensed commercial use, colleagues are asked to contact the team that originally developed this, before use: Sherri.Fay@nshealth.ca or if no reply Kenneth.Rockwood@Dal.Ca)here

Case studies

We have worked with a number of our SCFN teams to develop case studies, presenting the work they have undertaken over the course of their improvement journey. Their stories are below…..

Vascular - East Kent Hospitals University NHS FT

Cancer - Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust

Neurosurgery - Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust

Adult Critical Care - Royal Papworth Hospital NHS FT

Spinal Surgery - Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital NHS Trust

Cardiac (TAVI) - Barts Health NHS Trust

Renal - Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS FT

Chemotherapy - The Newcastle Upon Tyne Hospitals NHS FT

Chemotherapy - The Christie NHS FT

general FRAILTY REFERENCE DOCUMENTS and web-links

Shared decision making

Shared decision making ensures that individuals are supported to make decisions that are right for them.  It is a collaborative process through which a clinician supports a patient to reach a decision about their treatment. There are a number of resources available on the NHS England website.

Other resources are listed below: