Delirium Clinical Practice Guidelines: What Do We Know, and What Should We Do?

Dr. Danya Khoujah joins GEMCast host Dr. Christina to dive into the first clinical practice guideline in the Geriatric Emergency Department (GED) Guidelines 2.0, which is dedicated to delirium. Delirium is a clinical syndrome characterised by acute and fluctuating disturbances of attention, awareness, perception or consciousness and it commonly affects older adults presenting to the ED. However, it is often missed, which has significant impacts on mortality and functional status of older patients. Khoujah is an attending physician in the Department of Emergency Medicine at AdventHealth Tampa in Florida, and host of GEDC’s expert-panel webinars. She is part of the multidisciplinary team that created this GRADE-based clinical guideline, and in this episode, she talks through the development and recommendations arising from the guideline. The group aimed to assess the quality and applicability of direct and indirect evidence, with the goal of providing ED clinicians a patient-centred approach to delirium. To do so they asked 3 key questions: Which older patients in the ED are at higher risk of delirium? Which diagnostic tests are effective at identifying ED delirium? Do older ED patients with delirium need a CT head? Tune in to today’s episode to hear more about risk stratification, screening, diagnosing and brain imaging for delirium in the ED, and keep an eye out for upcoming clinical guidelines in the GED Guidelines 2.0 series including medication safety, fall prevention, dementia, elder abuse and frailty. Find more information about this topic at https://gedcollaborative.com/resource... GEMCAST is a Geriatric Emergency Medicine Podcast created to help clinicians, nurses, or paramedics who take care of older adults, particularly in the Emergency Department setting. GEMCast episodes, show notes and recommended resources can be found on the GEDC website at gedcollaborative.com/resources/?type=podcast.