The frailty network's five actions
Canadian Frailty Network · The AVOID Frailty program, a national public-health initiative.
Frailty is a state of reduced reserve across several systems at once, so that a small setback has a large effect - a minor infection leading to a hospital stay, a stumble leading to a lost year. It is common, it is measurable well before it shows, and it is substantially preventable. Canada's frailty network reduced the evidence to five actions and an acronym, aimed at people rather than at clinicians.
AVOID
- 01Activity - keep moving, including strength work
- 02Vaccinate - against influenza, pneumococcus, shingles and the rest
- 03Optimize medications - review the whole list, not one drug at a time
- 04Interact - keep people around you
- 05Diet - enough protein and enough food, which is not the usual advice
What this changes here
Our reading, not theirs.
Three of these five - medications, interaction and diet - are the ones most often left out of a preventive assessment, and all three are topics here. The fourth, vaccination, is ordinary family medicine and easy to let slip. This list is close to a summary of what our home services have been doing for years, which is why we point at it rather than writing our own version.
The topics this bears on
Read the original
Where to go next
The other work we read