The impact of frailty on the use of social services, medication and mortality risk: a cross-sectional study

Background: Frailty is a common condition in older people, and its prevalence increases with age. With an ageing population, the adverse consequences of frailty cause an increasing appeal to the health care system. The impact of frailty on population level is often assessed using adverse health outcomes, such as mortality and medication use. Use of community nursing services and services offered through the Social Support Act are hardly used in assessing the impact of frailty. However, these services are important types of care use, especially in relation to ageing in place. In this cross-sectional study, we aimed to assess the impact of frailty on use of Social Support Act services, use of community nursing services, medication use, and mortality. Methods: We used a frailty index, the FI-HM37, that was based on data from the Dutch Public Health Monitor 2016, for which respondents ≥ 65 years of age were included (n = 233,498). The association between frailty, the use of Social Support Act services, community nursing services and medication use was assessed using the Zero Inflated Poisson (ZIP) regression method. Survival analysis using Cox proportional hazards regression was conducted to estimate the hazard ratios for the association between frailty and mortality. Results: The ZIP regression with a final sample size of 181,350 showed that frailty affected care use even after correcting for several covariates mentioned in the literature. For each unit increase in frailty index (FI) score, the relative probability of using zero Social Support services decreased with 7.7 (p < 0.001). The relative chance of zero community nursing services decreased with 4.0 (p < 0.001) for each unit increase in FI score. Furthermore, for each unit increase in FI score, the likelihood of zero medication use decreased with 2.9 (p < 0.001). Finally, for each unit increase in FI score, the mortality risk was 3.8 times higher (CI = 3.4–4.3; p < 0.001). Conclusions: We demonstrated that frailty negatively affects the use of Social Support Act services, the use of community nursing services, medication use, and mortality risk. This study is the first to demonstrate the impact of frailty on Social Support Act services and community nursing services in the Netherlands. Findings emphasize the importance of frailty prevention for older people and public health policy.