Provocations Seminar Series 2 - Seventh Provocation

Led by Susan Pickard and Chris Williams

12 March 2025, 12.15pm

The final session in our provocation series two will be led by Professor Susan Pickard, Professor of Sociology and Head of Department for Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology at the University of Liverpool.

Frailty is increasingly operationalised as a medical condition that interacts with other conditions to put an older person at risk of adverse outcomes. Clinically, it is measured and approached through numerous tools and scores. These developments are generally viewed as positive and helpful in the clinical setting. However, as a label that has long been used in the English language to denote a state of weakness and fragility, it is strongly resisted and feared by older people themselves. At the same time, there is a social dimension to the experience of (both kinds of) frailty: it originates as much in the social as in the biological domain, co-exists with sources of strength, resilience and well-being and is dynamic and changeable for a combination of all these reasons. Indeed, the connection between social events and health is corroborated in neuroendocrinology and potentially traceable through biomarkers conceptualised through the allostatic load.

The breakout sessions will consider the following questions:

1. How does it feel as a health care professional to be more aware of the lived experience of frailty and the way it is structured?
2. How would you use this understanding in your practice?
3. How useful would you find it for these concepts to be incorporated into a tool kit designed to help practitioners in your interactions with older frail people and what would you like to see in this toolkit?

Host or Publisher NHS R&D NORTH WEST