Delirium care, science and lived experience
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The patient still has delirium. What needs attention today? Five questions for reviewing causes, recovery, distress, complications and the shared plan.
Delirium care involves three main pillars: detection, treatment, and prevention. In this blog I provide a concise guide to the fundamentals of delirium care in adults outside of ICU settings.
[1] Delirium can be a presenting feature of life-threatening illness, physiological disturbance or drug intoxication People with delirium often have serious, acute illness. In some cases the delirium is the presenting feature, with perhaps only a few other clues.
Guidance to practitioners based on validation data alone is incomplete: a tool performing well under research conditions may not perform well under clinical conditions. At the moment we are mostly operating in the dark, not really knowing if policy advice based on data from research validation data alone is good.