Timely goals of care documentation in patients with frailty in the COVID-19 era: a retrospective multi-site study

Background Older frail patients are more likely to have timely goals of care (GOC) documentation than non-frail patients. Aims To investigate whether timely documentation of GOC within 72 h differed in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic (2020), compared with the pre-COVID-19 era (2019) for older frail patients. Methods Multi-site retrospective cohort study was conducted in two public hospitals where all consecutive frail adult patients aged >= 65 years were admitted under medical units for at least 24 h between 1 March 31 and October in 2019 and between 1 March and 31 October 2020 were included. The GOC was derived from electronic records. Frailty status was derived from hospital coding data using hospital frailty risk score (frail >= 5). The primary outcome was the documentation of GOC within 72 h of hospital admission. Secondary outcomes included hospital mortality, rapid response call, intensive care unit admission, prolonged hospital length of stay (>= 10 days) and time to the documentation of GOC. Results The study population comprised 2021 frail patients admitted in 2019 and 1849 admitted in 2020, aged 81.2 and 90.9 years respectively. The proportion of patients with timely GOC was lower in 2020, than 2019 (48.3% (893/1849) vs 54.9% (1109/2021); P = 0.021). After adjusting for confounding factors, patients in 2020 were less likely to receive timely GOC (odds ratio = 0.77; 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.68-0.88). Overall time to GOC documentation was longer in 2020 (hazard ratio = 0.86; 95% CI 0.80-0.93). Conclusion Timely GOC documentation occurred less frequently in frail patients during the COVID-19 pandemic than in the pre-COVID-19 era.