“Frail Before Surgery”

Frailty plays a key role in how patients recover after operations. It’s the responsibility of those in charge of care to check on the elderly who are going in for surgery. The Clinical Risk Analysis Index (RAI-C) is a tool that doctors use to see if someone is frail before surgery. This is important because it can help prevent problems. They also came up with a new way to see if patients are frail simply by asking them. It's called the self-screening. The problem is, not everyone is on the same page. While it's a good way to solve problems when resources are low, the study's results are going to be different. This begs an important question: Can we trust our eyes, or do we need someone else to tell us what we can’t see? Now, imagine you’re the doctor. You have a choice: would you trust a professional to come in and do an assessment, or do you push the button that says “You need to take care of yourself”? Doctors know that frailty is a big deal when it comes to postoperative recovery in older patients. It can really complicate things, and sometimes even be life-threatening. A way to get around this is with the help of a tool. The Clinical Risk Analysis Index (RAI-C) is one of these tools. It's basically a checklist that doctors use to find the frailness. This is especially important for determining who needs help before surgery.

Now, what if you asked the patients to screen them self for frailty? What if they were the ones to determine their own frailness? In that circumstance, what should we expect? It would be easy to think that you'll get the same results with self-screening, but is that the case? The question is, are there going to be differences in the results that doctors see and what the patients say about themselves? After surgery, patients recover better if they have been given some form of help before they have gone in for the procedure. This is especially important for those who are frail, but it’s also important to know who really needs the help and who can take care of themselves. This is where it can get tricky. Resources are sometimes limited, so there are challenges in doing the checks. The question is, can the patient self-screening replace the other method? Is it worth it, to ask the patient or to get a professional to assess them? That's the real question. We need to figure out, if everybody is talking about the same thing when they say frail. And that is what those before us have been wondering about for years. The question that nobody has been able to answer, until now. If someone says they see frailty, should we trust that? Or do we leave it to the person in charge to figure it out?

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