Application and implementation of brief geriatric assessment in primary care and community settings: a scoping review

Background: Comprehensive Geriatric Assessment is the gold standard of clinical care for older patients but its application in the primary care setting is limited, possibly due to its time-consuming process. Hence, a brief geriatric assessment could be a feasible alternative. We conducted a scoping review to identify which brief geriatric assessment tools have been evaluated or implemented in primary and community care settings and to identify the domains assessed including their reported outcomes.

Methods: CENTRAL, PubMed and Embase were searched using specific text words and MeSH for articles published from inception that studied evaluation or implementation of brief geriatric assessments in primary care or community setting.

Results: Twenty-five articles were included in the review, of which 11 described brief geriatric assessments implemented in community, nine in primary care and five in mixed settings. Physical health, functional, mobility/balance and psychological/mental emerged as four domains that are most assessed in brief geriatric assessments. Self-reported questionnaire is the key approach, but uncertainty remains on the validity of subjective cognitive assessments. Brief geriatric assessments have been administered by non-healthcare professionals. The duration taken to complete ranged from five to 20 min. Studies did not report significant change in the clinical outcomes of older adults except for better identification of those with higher needs.

Conclusion: The studies reported that brief geriatric assessments could identify older adults with unmet needs or geriatric syndromes, but they did not report improved health outcomes when combined with clinical intervention pathways. Clarity of brief geriatric assessments' questions is important to ensure the feasibility of using self-administered questionnaire by older adults. Future studies should determine which groups of older adults benefit the most from the brief assessments when these are paired with additional evaluations and interventions.