We are honoured to announce that our Frailty in European Emergency Departments (FEED) study by the European Taskforce on Geriatric Emergency Medicine has been awarded ‘Best European Geriatric Medicine Paper 2024’ by the journal.
The study recruited 3479 older people attending 62 emergency departments over a single twenty-four-hour period, and identified the prevalence of frailty to be 40%: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41999-023-00926-3
Congratulations to all involved!
We are delighted to share the news that 500 participants from around the world have now registered for our course on Palliative Care in the ED!
The e-course is free of charge and can be accessed through the EUSEM Academy elearning platform:
https://eusem.org/education/courses-traineeships/palliative-care-in-the-emergency-department-ecourse
Participants at the Dutch North Sea EM Conference in beautiful Egmond aan Zee were treated to a programme track on GeriEM:
Following the recent recommendations for older people receiving critical care endorsed by the European Society for Intensive Care Medicine, we have produced our commentary for the EM community: https://doi.org/10.1097/MEJ.0000000000001227
As frailty provides us with a common frame on which to build and inform impressions and decisions, we advocate for its early consideration, perhaps even as soon as the primary survey (ABCDE–F).
BMC Emergency Medicine have announced a call for papers for their special collection on GeriEM: https://bit.ly/3DTepuT
This collection invites clinicians and researchers to contribute to the field of geriatric emergency medicine by exploring the unique challenges and opportunities in caring for older adults in emergency settings. Submissions will undergo peer review, and it should be noted that BMC Emergency Medicine is an open access journal with article processing charges.
BMC Emergency Medicine special collection on GeriEM – call for papers
An incredible 400 participants from all around the world have registered for our ecourse on Palliative Care in the Emergency Department!
The eCourse is free of charge and can be accessed through the EUSEM Academy elearning platform:
https://eusem.org/education/courses-traineeships/palliative-care-in-the-emergency-department-ecourse
We are pleased to announce our first joint webinar with the ACEP GeriEM section, on the topic of Exploring Geriatric ED Accreditation and featuring European speaker and expert Thomas Dreher-Hummel.
The webinar is scheduled for Monday 17 March 2025 at 11am US Central Time (5pm UK, 6pm CET). Please register through the ACEP platform: https://learn.acep.org/cw/course-details?entryId=17538956
Forty-eight new recommendations for critical care for people aged 85+ have been produced by a multi-disciplinary expert consortium. The researchers conducted a Delphi study, and the findings have been endorsed by the European Society of Intensive Care Medicine.
The group’s recommendations give us food for thought on the core principles, values, and competences of acute geriatrics care, as the themes and topics bear many similarities with the GeriEM recommendations from our own European Taskforce.
The European Taskforce on Geriatric Emergency Medicine (ETGEM), a collaboration between GeriEM sections of the European Society for Emergency Medicine and the European Geriatric Medicine Society, published their expert clinical recommendations in 2022: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41999-021-00578-1.
The collaboration subsequently produced eight posters covering major recommendations and an accompanying podcast series. The posters are available in English, German, Polish, Portuguese, Turkish, and – brand new for 2025 and co-ordinated by Santiago Castejon-Hernandez – Spanish: https://posters.geriemeurope.eu/
The 2023 FEED Study reported the prevalence of Frailty in European Emergency Departments, using consecutive administration of the Clinical Frailty Scale (CFS) for all older people attending 62 hospitals during a 24 hour period.
In this new sub-study analysing data ‘missingness’ in routine CFS administrations conducted immediately prior to the FEED Study’s cohort recruitment, researchers share the concerning finding that over half of mandated observations were being missed. Those people who were not white, or who had lower acuity presentations were disproportionately likely to have their CFS missing.
The paper provides some food for thought for clinicians and managers working in centres where frailty screening is used, as attention to studying and improving implementation is almost certainly necessary. Meanwhile, researchers using frailty screening outcomes in routine datasets must carefully consider the provenance and completeness of data while determining the validity of their analyses.