Assessment of frailty by paramedics using the clinical frailty scale - an inter-rater reliability and accuracy study

BACKGROUND: Frailty assessment by paramedics in the prehospital setting is understudied. The goals of this study were to assess the inter-rater reliability and accuracy of frailty assessment by paramedics using the Clinical Frailty Scale (CFS). METHODS: This was a cross-sectional study with paramedics exposed to 30 clinical vignettes created from real-life situations. There was no teaching intervention prior to the study and paramedics were only provided with the French version of the CFS (definitions and pictograms). The primary outcome was the inter-rater reliability of the assessment. The secondary outcome was the accuracy, compared with the expert-based assessment. Reliability was determined by calculating an intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC). Accuracy was assessed through a mixed effects logistic regression model. A sensitivity analysis was carried out by considering that an assessment was still accurate if the score differed from no more than 1 level. RESULTS: A total of 56 paramedics completed the assessment. The overall assessment was found to have good inter-rater reliability (ICC = 0.87 [95%CI 0.81–0.93]). The overall accuracy was moderate at 60.6% (95%CI 54.9–66.1) when considering the full scale. It was however much higher (94.8% [95%CI 92.0–96.7] when close assessments were considered as accurate. The only factor associated with accurate assessment was field experience. CONCLUSION: The assessment of frailty by paramedics was reliable in this vignette-based study. However, the accuracy deserved to be improved. Future research should focus on the clinical impact of these results and on the association of prehospital frailty assessment with patient outcomes. REGISTRATION: This study was registered on the Open Science Framework registries (10.17605/OSF.IO/VDUZY). SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12873-023-00875-x.