Home > Adults > Care of the Elderly >

Advice and guidance - Care of the Elderly

Checked: 23-08-2022 by Vicky Ryan Next Review: 23-08-2023

Overview

Care of the Elderly A&G is offered at NBT via eRS. A&G requests will be answered within 24 to 72 hours (most within 24 hours).

This service should not be used for urgent advice or where immediate advice is required, for example, when admission to hospital is a possibility. When this is the case, please see Frailty - Urgent Care page or Medical Admissions and Weekday IUC Professional Line

Requests for advice and guidance should be submitted vie e-RS and meet the following criteria:

Patient aged ≥65 years and clinical frailty scale ≥5 and/ or well-known to one of the department’s outpatient clinics.
Question unlikely to be better answered by another specialty.

To enable the consultants to give the best advice possible please consider the following points:

Give a clear concise history and examination findings- avoid cutting and pasting long lists of consultation notes that are not relevant to the problem in hand.
Include relevant results, investigations and recent correspondence if appropriate but avoid multiple attachments that can take time to download and make the triage process more cumbersome.
Ask a clear clinical question and avoid ambiguity.
Avoid requests for complex patients known to an individual consultant as they are unlikely to be the consultant giving the advice and may not have easy access to details of previous contacts with the patient. In these cases only consider writing or emailing the relevant secretary directly.

Please also consider RACOP Clinics for rapid outpatient assessment.

Advice and guidance - NBT

General Advice

Advice and guidance can be requested via Medicine for Older People A and G - Southmead, which is available on eRS.

Advice requests should ideally be typed into the free text window of the advice request body on e-RS rather than attaching a separate letter or Word document. If you attach a Clinical Information Summary, please ensure it is named this, so that clinicians at secondary care can opt to look at it if they wish to turn the request into a referral.

Priority – Routine
Specialty – Geriatric Medicine
Clinic – Cognitive disorders, Falls, Bone health and Osteoporosis for Older People (BHOOP), Movement Disorders, Not otherwise specified
Service Name – Geriatric Medicine A&G – Southmead – RVJ

The Geriatric Medicine Secretaries at NBT can also be contacted via telephone:0117 4146005.

Bone Health and Osteoporosis Advice

Advice and guidance is available from the Bone Health and Osteoporosis for Older People (BHOOP) via eRS at NBT if patient is aged >75 - see the Osteoporosis page for details.

Advice and guidance - UHBW

There is no Advice and Guidance service on eRS for care of the elderly at UHBW.

There is however a Frailty phone line for urgent advice which is available Mon - Fri, 9am - 5pm

Efforts are made to ensure the accuracy and agreement of these guidelines, including any content uploaded, referred to or linked to from the system. However, BNSSG ICB cannot guarantee this. This guidance does not override the individual responsibility of healthcare professionals to make decisions appropriate to the circumstances of the individual patient, in consultation with the patient and/or guardian or carer, in accordance with the mental capacity act, and informed by the summary of product characteristics of any drugs they are considering. Practitioners are required to perform their duties in accordance with the law and their regulators and nothing in this guidance should be interpreted in a way that would be inconsistent with compliance with those duties.

Information provided through Remedy is continually updated so please be aware any printed copies may quickly become out of date.