Perspectives of older adults, caregivers, healthcare providers on frailty screening in primary care: a systematic review and qualitative meta-synthesis

BACKGROUND: Screening is often recommended as a first step in frailty management. Many guidelines call to implicate frailty screening into practice in the primary care setting. However, few countries or organizations implement it. Understanding and clarifying the stakeholders’ views and issues faced by the implementation is essential to the successful implementation of frailty screening. However, the systematic review on stakeholders’ views of frailty screening in primary care is decidedly limited. Our objective was to explore the perspective of older adults, caregivers, and healthcare providers on frailty screening and determine the enablers and barriers to implementing frailty screening in primary care. METHODS: A systematic search of six databases and other resources was conducted following JBI’s three-step search strategy. The search resulted in 7362 articles, of which 97 were identified for further assessment according to the inclusion criteria. After the full-text screening, quality assessment and data extraction were carried out using the tools from Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI). Moreover, reviewers used the approach of meta-aggregative of JBI to analyze data and synthesis the findings. RESULTS: Six studies were included. A total of 63 findings were aggregated into 12 categories and then further grouped into three synthesized findings:1) capacity of healthcare providers and older adults; 2) opportunity in the implementation of frailty screening; 3) motivation in the implementation of frailty screening. These themes can help identify what influences the implementation of screening from the perspective of stakeholders. CONCLUSIONS: This meta-synthesis provides evidence on the barriers and enablers of frailty screening in primary care, from the aspects of psychological, physical, social, material, etc. However, stakeholder perspectives of frailty screening have not been adequately studied. More research and efforts are needed to explore the influencing factors and address the existing barriers. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12877-022-03173-6.