Characterization of patients admitted to specialized geriatric acute care hospital units with the German version of the Standardized Evaluation and Intervention for Seniors at Risk (SEISAR) screening-instrument: a cross-sectional study

The Standardized Evaluation and Intervention for Seniors at Risk (SEISAR) screening tool records major geriatric problems, originally applied in the emergency department. Particularly, the distinction of compensated and uncompensated problems is an interesting and new approach. Therefore, we translated the SEISAR in German language and used it to characterize patients in specialized geriatric hospital wards in Germany and to gather initial experience regarding its usability and practicability. The tool was translated by three independent specialists in geriatric medicine and backtranslated for quality-assurance by a non-medical English native speaker. In a second step, 8 acute care geriatric hospital departments used the translated version to characterize all consecutive patients admitted over a period of one month between December 2019 and May 2020 at time of admission. Most of the 756 patients (78