Frailty Hub: Frailty and the NHS

National Frailty Improvement Collaborative

The National Frailty Improvement Collaborative is a new improvement and learning programme led by NHS England focused on learning how to transform care for people living with frailty.

This collaborative brings together multidisciplinary teams, patients, families and communities from across seven health and care systems to use improvement method to test and refine implementation of evidence based frailty-attuned care. The focus is on learning together - understanding both the ‘what’ and, arguably more importantly, the ‘how’ to improve care, outcomes and experience.

The programme runs alongside existing local and national strategies and programmes aiming to improvement quality, outcomes and experience for people living with frailty. As the seven sites progress through their improvement journey, insights and learning will be shared about the innovations, challenges, and discoveries to support improvement on a national scale and inform policy, planning, commissioning guidance.

Seven collaborative ‘discovery’ sites (places), one per region, were selected from 31 applications to the national call for expressions of interest.

They are:

• South and East Essex, Mid and South Essex ICB
• Central Lancashire, Lancashire and South Cumbria ICB
• Surrey Downs, NHS Surrey Heartlands ICB
• North and South Gloucester, Gloucestershire ICB
• Kingston and Richmond, Southwest London ICB
• Wolverhampton, Black Country ICB
• Hull & East Riding, Humber and North Yorkshire ICB

The learning from this first ‘discovery’ year is informing the design of a longer term frailty improvement collaborative in future years to support the implementation of frailty attuned care across a whole system. This will include mechanisms for national spread and scale of learning and improvement, and generating insight and learning to inform national policy, guidance and approaches.