Nurses' experiences of delirium and how to identify delirium-A qualitative study

Delirium is a serious, acute medical condition which places a heavy burden on the patient, his or her family and healthcare professionals. There have been only a limited number of studies to explore nurses' experiences of delirium and how delirium is identified in community care. The research questions of the study are as follows: "How do community care nurses' experience delirium?" and "How is delirium identified?".

This study has been designed as an explorative and descriptive study.

A topic-based interview guide was developed containing questions associated with the Registered Nurses' experiences of their meetings with people with delirium and their identification of delirium.

Nurses working in the community care need to know more about delirium as they play a key role in treatment. Our results also show that the participants have difficulty in establishing whether a patient is suffering from acute confusion/delirium, depression or dementia.