Groningen Frailty Indicator

The Groningen Frailty Indicator (GFI) is a brief 15-item self-report screening instrument that measures frailty across four domains: physical, cognitive, social, and psychological. Developed at the University of Groningen by Nardi Steverink, Joris Slaets, and colleagues around the turn of the millennium and characterized in Schuurmans and colleagues' 2004 study 'Old or Frail: What Tells Us More?', the GFI was designed to identify older people whose vulnerability is better captured by accumulated functional losses than by chronological age alone. Each domain contributes items scored so that the presence of a problem adds a point, producing a total of 0–15, with a score of 4 or higher commonly taken to indicate frailty. The GFI is widely used in Dutch and European primary care and oncology to flag older patients for fuller geriatric evaluation.