[Views of general practitioners on the frailty in elderly: a qualitative study].

The concept of frailty in the elderly denotes patients at higher risk of fall, hospitalization, dependency and death. Its prevalence is estimated in France at 15% for people over 65 years. Frailty could be a target for preventing avoidable loss of autonomy. To explore the views of French general practitioners (GPs) on the concept of frailty in the elderly, we have conducted two focus groups with GPs, and five interviews with GPs qualified in geriatrics. Data collection was guided by an adaptive topic schedule. The analysis of the verbatims shows that the concept of frailty is fairly well defined by GPs, but its implementation in clinical practice raises difficulties. They consider that screening frail elderly is possible, but indicate that they don't have any tool adapted to their practice. They feel competent for the diagnostic assessment and the management of the patients detected as frail, and are ready to get further involved, especially within the framework of inter-professional approaches, in particular with nurses. The expected benefits of screening and managing frailty in the elderly needs to be based on data from clinical research. Inter-professional collaborations should be developed in the outpatient setting, as well as referral to hospital whenever comprehensive assessment or management of frail patients is needed.