Number of partners
346

Partner contributions
$15.2 million

Headquarters
Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario

Scientific Director
John Muscedere

Board chair
Russell Williams
Vice President, Government Relations and Public Policy, Canadian Diabetes Association

Improving care for frail elderly Canadians

The opportunity

With a growing population of elderly people in Canada, and continued advances in medical care, the technology and methods for treating frail elderly and providing appropriate end-of-life care is a major issue facing Canada’s health and social care systems. Technologies and treatments have proven extremely beneficial in helping Canadians live longer with chronic disease. Yet there is mounting evidence that their unwanted use at the end of life is associated with worse ratings of quality of life for both patients and families. Many of these technologies and treatments are also expensive. There is a serious and immediate need to improve the care of seriously ill, frail elderly patients through a rigorous evaluation and ethical implementation of health care technologies, and to improve communication and decision-making about the use of these life-sustaining technologies.

How CFN is seizing the opportunity

The Canadian Frailty Network (CFN) is a national initiative to improve care for older Canadians living with frailty, increase frailty recognition and assessment, support research and interventions, and mobilize evidence to transform health and social care for frail older Canadians. CFN works to break down health silos by facilitating a collaborative and family-centric approach across disciplines and sectors to identify gaps in care and develop solutions to complex questions from acute and critical care to community care. Through research and knowledge sharing, and training the next generation to care for this vulnerable population, CFN aims to have an impact in four areas: improved care of the sick elderly; improved efficiency of the health care system; evidence-informed policy and practice; and reduced moral distress for patients, families, and caregivers.

Among the results

• Patients at four hospitals in Ontario and Alberta are being surveyed to determine the quality of communication between seriously ill patients and their physicians. A knowledge translation project will also benchmark end-of-life care practices for the elderly in primary care.
• Testing by home care teams in Quebec will examine how a training program for doctors and interprofessional teams can improve the experience of the frail elderly and their families and caregivers in confronting the decision to stay at home or move to a care facility. Home care is a rapidly growing sector and this study will lay the foundation for a national strategy to ensure that no one has to make this difficult decision alone.
• CFN partnered with the Saskatchewan Health Research Foundation to co-fund two of the province’s Collaborative Innovation Development Grants. One of the projects will explore individualized, patient-oriented, compassionate care for palliative patients and their families, and the other will study the intersections of leadership, interdisciplinary teams and patient engagement in Home First.
• A CFN-funded study found that engaging with health care partners during the process of developing a research proposal improves community access, organization participation and participant recruitment. Clinicians who felt they were active members of a research group were more willing to invite patients to join a study.

Connect with CFN

•  Website
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•  LinkedIn
•  Facebook

* (formerly known as Technology Evaluation in the Elderly Network)