The kick-off meeting of the SUNFRAIL project was organised in Luxembourg on the 27 and 28 May 2015. The project will run over 30 months and gathers 11 partners from 6 countries, where of 7 partners are Reference Sites in the European Innovation Partnership on Active and Healthy Ageing (EIP-AHA). The project is coordinated by the Emilia-Romagna Region (IT).
SUNFRAIL aims at improving the identification, prevention and management of frailty and care of multimorbidity in community dwelling persons of local-regional settings of EU countries. This will be achieved through the development of a multi-modal model, with a common core to facilitate scale-up and adaptation to the specificities of different health care systems and to different sociocultural contexts. Once the model has been developed and validated, it will be experimented in different settings to ensure its applicability and transferability to various local-regional settings. The project will also support the identification of tools for the prediction of frailty and multimorbidity by level of care, focussing on community based prevention and avoidable hospitalization, and for professional’s skills improvement and analysis of costs. The two-day meeting started with a presentation from Directorate General for Health and Food Safety about the European Commission’s priorities regarding frailty and multimorbidity, followed by an introduction by SUNFRAIL’s Chafea project officer, on the European Commission’s and Chafea’s expectations on SUNFRAIL. Thereafter, the work package leaders outlined the focus of the seven work packages namely; project and financial management, dissemination, monitoring and evaluation, designing a model for frailty and multimorbidity, validating the model, experimenting the model and Health Care Staff Innovative Education.

