Effectiveness of nursing intervention to reduce delirium in adult critically ill - A protocol for a randomized trial

The incidence of delirium in intensive care patients remains high, and its consequences have a high negative impact on patients, their families, health care teams, and society in general. Because delirium can lead to increased hospital stay, increased days on mechanical ventilation, increased risk of adverse events, increased memory loss and even increased mortality. However, some factors that precipitate delirium can be modified to reduce its presence and duration through non-pharmacological measures. Thus, the present protocol seeks to establish the theoretical and methodological background to develop and test nursing interventions to reduce delirium in adult patients hospitalized in the intensive care unit. For this reason, it is based on the theoretical elements of delirium and a nursing theory, called the Dynamic Symptoms Model (DSM), to understand the phenomenon and how nursing knowledge can be used to intervene. Thus, a nursing intervention proposal is proposed based on the DSM and scientific evidence, and a methodological design of a randomized controlled clinical trial type with parallel groups, which allows measuring the effectiveness of the designed interventions, following methodological and ethical rigor and with adequate control of biases.