Accurate delirium screening when there is no carer available – impossible, right?

Suzanne Timmons is a geriatrician working in Mercy University hospital, Cork and a senior lecturer in University College Cork. She has a big clinical and research interest in delirium and dementia care in hospitals.

Delirium  is common in older people admitted to hospital, and is a serious condition that needs to be identified quickly on admission. But many busy hospital staff still don’t routinely screen older people for delirium, even when they have known dementia (dementia puts people at very high risk of delirium: see the Cork Dementia Study).

In this study, we tested out five simple cognitive tests to see if they could be used to screen for delirium. The tests were: the Six-item Cognitive Impairment Test (6-CIT; measuring attention, orientation to time, and short-term memory); the Clock-Drawing test; Spatial Span Forwards (pointing to a sequence of squares in a certain order); reciting the months of the year backwards (MOTYB); and copying a shape containing two intersecting pentagons.