Articles – Delirium Words

Published April 26, 2025

The CAM-Lite: Why this Unofficial Delirium Screening Tool Falls Dangerously Short

The emergence and widespread adoption of the unvalidated CAM-Lite in EHR systems has created a patient-safety disaster by missing most delirium cases. We are now saddled with a widely-embedded, yet unofficial, unvalidated, and markedly inferior version of the original CAM that, in short, does not work. The evidence summarised in this blog indicates clearly that the CAM-Lite greatly under-detects delirium. Under-detection of delirium is associated with multiple negative consequences and, given the scale of delirium, this is one of the most impactful patient-safety issues in current healthcare across the world. We need to move beyond this blind alley and find better ways of serving our patients with delirium.

Read article

Published March 12, 2025

The Forest of Revolving Nightmares : a personal account of experiencing delirium

By Dr Sharmella Summan The doctors and nurses saved my life. The porter soothed my despairing soul. My family, despite my resistance, loved my heart back together.

Read article

Published October 6, 2021

Guide to delirium care

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.

Read article

Published December 29, 2020

Is your hospital delirium-sensitive?

What are your tool completion rates? What level of delirium are the tools detecting, and do they reflect the real rates of delirium? Only by closely measuring what we are doing can we tell if our hospitals are truly delirium-sensitive.

Read article

Published July 21, 2020

10 reasons why we should detect delirium

[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.

Read article

Published July 13, 2020

A classification of delirium assessment tools

Something that I had initially found confusing in the field of delirium was the sheer number of tools that have been developed. A huge variety. And it was not always clear what each one was for and how it should be used.

Read article

Published July 7, 2020

Delirium diagnosis in the patient who is too sleepy to speak

You approach a patient’s bedside with the aim of doing an assessment for delirium. The first thing you notice is that the patient is very sleepy, and they do not respond verbally to your greeting and a touch on their shoulder. They open their eyes for a few seconds, but they show no other response. They do not produce any speech.

Read article

Published June 30, 2020

We should always inform families of a patient’s diagnosis of delirium

We all know that healthcare systems could do better in detecting delirium – this remains a major priority. But we know from studies that even in patients with a diagnosis that families are often left in the dark.Many families do not know what delirium is and how to recognise it. So when sitting with their family member with delirium they may think that the person has developed dementia …

Read article

Published June 22, 2020

A big gap in the delirium literature: data on clinical implementation

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.

Read article

Published June 15, 2020

Delirium detection in routine clinical care: two basic processes

We need to look at two processes (1) detection of delirium at first presentation, during care transitions, and at other times when delirium is first suspected, and (2) monitoring for new-onset delirium in inpatients. What approaches might be considered?

Read article