Picking up the pace to live well with advancing frailty

There’s so much written and spoken in current literature about health, social and mental health impacts of an ageing population. These impacts generally underpin an increased health burden for the individual and increased workload for a diminishing workforce. However, challenging this negative culture, especially for people living with extreme frailty, gives opportunity to change perspectives, enhancing life in later years as much as possible. 

As clinicians, we should consistently consider exercise as the bedrock of clinical practice to help our population to age better. This might not be headline news across the therapy workforce, as evidence has recognised it for years. However, there are questions across the wider workforce asking what exercise should be recommended to whom, when and for how long? 

And the real rub in advancing frailty can be cries of ‘we don’t want to recommend something that makes matters worse’ or ‘exercises might increase the falls risk’. We listened to this concern and devised a simple, quick exercise programme, recommended for twice-daily intervention called STEP: Start Today Exercise Programme. It consists of seated exercises targeted towards people who are frail, with low activity levels and not currently exercising. 

As clinicians, we should consistently consider exercise as the bedrock of clinical practice to help our population to age better.

The idea is twofold – to increase confidence and function for people often overlooked for formal exercise programmes; and to start increasing confidence across our multi-professional workforce to recommend exercise as part of everyday interventions. Since the project launch in 2022, we have evaluated the outcomes suggesting service-user and clinician acceptability with ease of adoption. We’ve started to shift confusion, negativity and fear towards clarity, positivity and hope. Tackling frailty is possible. A 101-year-old participant said: ‘Don’t call me old just yet, I’m still able to touch my toes….’