The need for change in the old people’s health care methodologies in Brazil is real. In this view, the Brazilian Public Health School (Ensp/Fiocruz) develops the project ‘Vulnerabilidade e fragilidade: proposta de indicadores epidemiológicos para o monitoramento em saúde do idoso na atenção básica (Vulnerability and frailty: proposal of epidemiologic indicators for monitoring old people’s health in basic care)’, supported by Fiotec.

Monitoring the health conditions and their determiners contributes to finding changes over time, providing subsidies to social and health policies more effective to specific populations, in this case, old people. Vulnerability grants them an increased risk of functional disability and death.

That is why the project has as purpose rating two monitoring tools. One is VES-13, a relevant vulnerability tracking instrument, not only for the clinic care to old people, but also for health management and researches on aging. The other is the Tilburg Frailty Indicator (TFI), serving to assess the frailty.

Practice

The project execution is as follows: a longitudinal study is undergoing with 60-year-old or older individuals, users of the Unified Health System (SUS), to assess the predictive validity of the two instruments (VES-13 and TFI), validated for the Brazilian elderly population, regarding the adverse health outcomes related to vulnerability and frailty.

The purpose is the results achieved to indicate the applicability of instruments to the health basic care and evidence the importance of their use in monitoring the old people’s health conditions, by incorporating them in the health care service routine.