Polish society is becoming elderly, and this has a real impact on the family doctor’s practice. Due to the lack of geriatricians, patient care in the elderly is a growing challenge for family physicians. Hence the need to become more familiar with the basic tools that can be used to assess the health status of elderly patients. This article is part of a series of works, in which we introduce doctors to the basic geriatric tools for assessing a patient aged 65+. In this way, we allow better agreement between geriatricians and family physicians, due to poor access to a specialists it should improve the quality of treatment of elderly patients. In this article we discuss the Barthel scale used for assessment patients functional efficiency and their eligibility for long-term care.