Prevalence and outcomes of frailty in unplanned hospital admissions: a systematic review and meta-analysis of hospital-wide and general (internal) medicine cohorts.

Background: Guidelines recommend routine frailty screening for all hospitalised older adults to inform care decisions, based mainly on studies in elective or speciality-specific settings. However, most hospital bed days are accounted for by acute non-elective admissions, in which the prevalence and prognostic value of frailty might differ, and uptake of screening is limited. We therefore did a systematic review and meta-analysis of frailty prevalence and outcomes in unplanned hospital admissions.