Vulnerable Elders Survey-13
The Vulnerable Elders Survey-13 (VES-13) is a brief, function-based screening tool that identifies community-dwelling older adults at increased risk of health deterioration, functional decline, and death. Developed by Debra Saliba, Neil Wenger, and colleagues at RAND as part of the Assessing Care of Vulnerable Elders (ACOVE) project and published in 2001, the VES-13 scores 13 items spanning age, self-rated health, six physical-function tasks, and five activities of daily living. Points are weighted and summed to a maximum of 10, and a total of 3 or more classifies a person as 'vulnerable' — a status associated in the validation cohort with a roughly fourfold greater risk of functional decline or death over two years. It takes under five minutes, can be self-completed by phone or mail, and requires no clinician, which has made it a workhorse triage instrument in geriatrics and geriatric oncology.
Source record
Citations copied verbatim from the method’s source record. No claim-level verification is inferred from them.
- Saliba, D., Elliott, M., Rubenstein, L. Z., Solomon, D. H., Young, R. T., Kamberg, C. J., Roth, C., MacLean, C. H., Shekelle, P. G., Sloss, E. M., & Wenger, N. S. (2001). The Vulnerable Elders Survey: A Tool for Identifying Vulnerable Older People in the Community. Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, 49(12), 1691-1699. · DOI 10.1046/j.1532-5415.2001.49281.x
- Min, L., Yoon, W., Mariano, J., Wenger, N. S., Elliott, M. N., Kamberg, C., & Saliba, D. (2009). The Vulnerable Elders-13 Survey Predicts 5-Year Functional Decline and Mortality Outcomes in Older Ambulatory Care Patients. Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, 57(11), 2070-2076. · DOI 10.1111/j.1532-5415.2009.02497.x
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Related methods
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