A common reason for a person living with dementia to need to be hospitalized or surgery is falling over and needing hip or knee surgery, chronic pain, respiratory infection, urine infection, or delirium, Draper et al 20 state that 30 to 50% of total patients admissions in acute care have a cognitive impairment, this is also backed up by Travers et al 203 and Christi & Cunningham 20. Hospitalized people with dementia are at increased risk of developing delirium. Rates of delirium in hospitals are estimated as 0-3% at admission, 3-0% during hospital episodes, and 70% when in intensive care units (Draper et al 20, Sampson et al 2009). This information hit me right at home and made me start this project if we can prevent delirium from happening at admission then that simple task can reduce the amount of time a patient with delirium is in the hospital. I used this information with all the staff to show them how important our process of admitting a person into surgery can affect the outcome for the patient.
Ensuring that the staff I worked with
really understood what delirium meant, we had a little game on a day when the hospital had gone completely blacked out and the generator did not work. This game involved people having an eye patch on or wearing someone else glass and trying to find some simple items that I had placed in simple places for them to find, Staff found that it was difficult to keep attention on what the task was with the area being darkened and losing their eyesight, I then explained that delirium is a disturbance of consciousness, attention, cognition and perception that develops over a short period of time, and usually fluctuates during the course of the day with orientation and awareness ( America Psychiatric Association, 999) just like if we removed the eye patches or had the power come back on staff would find it easier to do the task that was set in front of them. I then explained about my university assessment and the puzzle I was going to look at implementing. Due to good repour with the staff they were happy to try the puzzle with chocolates on board.