Preventing Delirium Takes a Village: Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Delirium Preventive Models of Care
BACKGROUND: Each hospital day of delirium incurs greater healthcare costs, higher levels of care, greater staff burden, and higher complication rates. Accordingly, administrators are incentivized to identify models of care that reduce delirium rates and associated costs.
PURPOSE: We present a systematic review and meta-analysis of delirium prevention models of care.
DATA SOURCES: Ovid MEDLINE, CINAHL, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, EMBASE, and PsycINFO.
STUDY SELECTION: Eligible models of care were defined as provider-oriented interventions involving revision of professional roles, multidisciplinary teams, and service integration. Included studies implemented multidomain, multicomponent interventions, used a validated delirium instrument, and enrolled a control group to evaluate efficacy or effectiveness.
DATA EXTRACTION: We extracted data on study design, population, model of care, outcomes, and results.
DATA SYNTHESIS: A total of 15 studies were included. All but two studies reported reduction in delirium or its duration, and 11 studies reported statistically significant improvements. Using random effects models, the pooled odds ratios of delirium incidence were 0.56 (95% CI: 0.37-0.85) from three randomized controlled trials, 0.63 (95% CI 0.37-1.07) from four pre–post intervention studies, and 0.79 (95% CI: 0.46-1.37) from three additional nonrandomized studies.
CONCLUSIONS: Several models of care can prevent delirium. In general, higher quality studies were more likely to demonstrate statistical significance of an effect. The diverse models of care included here explored interventions adapted to specific care settings, especially by addressing setting-specific delirium risk factors. These care models illustrate a range of promising strategies that deserve growing recognition, refinement, and implementation.
© 2019 Society of Hospital Medicine
CONCLUSION
To our knowledge, this is the first systematic review and meta-analysis of delirium preventive models of care. Models of care, as defined here, necessarily included a multidisciplinary team in which traditional staff roles had been revised to implement a multicomponent, multidomain intervention. Other recent reviews are available for multicomponent pharmacological and nonpharmacological interventions to prevent and manage delirium,41-49 but just as important as which interventions are being delivered is the team that delivers them. Care delivery in a complex medical system is more than handing a patient a medication or facilitating ambulation; it requires a choreographed dance of teamwork and integration across services. This review identifies promising models of care that deserve further recognition, refinement, and ultimately widespread implementation.
Acknowledgments
The authors comprise a writing group created through the Delirium Boot Camp, an annual meeting originally sponsored by the Center of Excellence for Delirium in Aging: Research, Training, and Educational Enhancement (CEDARTREE, Boston, Massachusetts); it is currently supported by the Network for Investigation of Delirium: Unifying Scientists (NIDUS, Boston, Massachusetts). The authors would like to thank medical librarian Rita Mitchell (Aurora Health Care, Milwaukee, Wisconsin) for the literature search, senior scientific writer and editor Joe Grundle (Aurora Research Institute, Milwaukee, Wisconsin) for editorial assistance, and graphics specialist Brian Miller (Aurora Research Institute, Milwaukee, Wisconsin) for help with the figures.
Disclosures
The authors report no relevant conflicts of interest.
Funding
No funding was dedicated to the conduct of this review.
