76 This is (Probably) Not the Frailty Solution You are Looking For: Utilisation of A Novel Stand-Alone Community-Based Ambulatory Care Unit

/Aim Our organisation wished to expand its “Care Closer To Home” capability, especially for older and/or frail patients. Our novel Ambulatory Care Unit (ACU) in a community hospital, staffed by GPs & nurses, opened a year ago. The ACU has some Point of Care (POCT) diagnostics, access to plain-film radiography and OT/physio. During the planning of the unit,” acute frailty” was anticipated to be core business. We wished to determine whether this turned out to be the case. Method Interrogation of the ACU patient log (spreadsheet collated from Data Collection Forms) Dec 2018-Nov 2019. Results Conclusion/Discussion Recording of CFS by ACU staff was poor, limiting the validity of our results. Nevertheless, it is obvious that most patients seen in our ACU are not frail, and do not require therapies input. Those that are frail, however, have an acceptable conversion-to-admission rate of 8.6%, comfortably below the national target (20%). Barriers to greater utilisation of our service for frail patients may include lack of urgent but non-emergency transport options for the less mobile, lack of access to certain commonly-used tests (e.g. CT, troponin) and referrer anticipation of difficulty discharging the frail patient in crisis without a new or boosted care package and/or access to respite beds. These aspects of service planning need to be addressed if the potential utility of community-based units like ours for frail patients is to be maximised.