Diagnosing delirium in older emergency department patients: validity and reliability of the delirium triage screen and the brief confusion assessment method

JH Han, A Wilson, EE Vasilevskis, A Shintani… - Annals of emergency …, 2013 - Elsevier
Study objective Delirium is a common form of acute brain dysfunction with prognostic
significance. Health care professionals caring for older emergency department (ED) patients
miss delirium in approximately 75% of cases. This error results from a lack of available
measures that can be performed rapidly enough to be incorporated into clinical practice.
Therefore, we developed and evaluated a novel 2-step approach to delirium surveillance for
the ED. Methods This prospective observational study was conducted at an academic ED in …