Comprehensive geriatric assessment: needs assessment tool

The Nuffield Trust has developed a tool to help providers and commissioners of care in England assess the needs of frail older people being cared for in hospital.

Version 2 of the toolkit is now available for download. If you downloaded the previous version of the toolkit, please note that the hospital trust sections of the toolkit relating to financial costs have been updated in the latest version to correct inconsistencies in the application of levels of deprivation. Please download the latest version to ensure all data is accurate. For further information, please contact website@nuffieldtrust.org.uk.

The Nuffield Trust, in collaboration with clinical investigators at the Universities of Leicester, Southampton and Newcastle, is part of a National Institute for Health Research (NIHR)-funded project to research acute hospital care for frail older people. The aim of the work is to inform NHS managers, clinicians, patients and the public about how best to organise hospital services for frail older people.

As part of this project, we have designed a tool for use by local providers (NHS acute trusts) and commissioners (local authorities) of care for older people (aged 75 years and older) in England.

The tool aims to make information more accessible in order to help providers and commissioners describe hospital activity and frailty in people aged 75 years and older.

Indicators have been developed for each local authority and NHS acute trust to describe populations, hospital costs and hospital usage for people aged 75 years and over using Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) and Office for National Statistics datasets. These are presented alongside HES-based measures of frailty by different types of hospital activity. We also include additional indicators on patient outcomes (mortality and emergency readmissions) for NHS acute trusts.

The tool may prove useful for local planning and making a business case for wider use of CGA locally.

Note: The tool for download is an Excel Binary Workbook file. XLSB files provide faster working access to very large spreadsheets. This file contains no macros, but a large number of formulas. The tool has been designed for use on a desktop computer.