Avoid this common hazard of being in the hospital

My mother was lucid and alert when she was hospitalized for pneumonia. But by the middle of the first night, she was wondering how she had ended up at a “hotel” that allowed strangers to enter her room at all hours. The second night, she wandered into the corridor, slipped, and fractured a hip. She didn’t leave the hospital alive. Her story, though extreme, is sadly typical. According to several major studies, about half of people over 65 have episodes of delirium — a sudden change in mental status — during hospital stays, and those who do are at increased risk for falling, requiring nursing home care, and developing cognitive impairment and dementia. It’s easy to understand why hospitalization can be disorienting. Your daily routine is overturned, you are introduced to a stream of new caregivers, and it’s hard to sleep through the night. Anesthetics or sedative medications can also affect your mental state. But decades ago, Dr. Sharon Inouye, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, recognized that delirium in older patients isn’t an inevitable consequence of hospitalization. HELP during hospitalization Dr. Inouye and colleagues developed the Hospital Elder Life Program (HELP). Available at 200 hospitals in the United States, HELP involves identifying patients at risk for delirium when they enter the hospital and assigning them to receive special care to minimize six major risk factors associated with delirium — cognitive impairment, sleep deprivati...
Source: New Harvard Health Information - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Caregiving Health care Healthy Aging Prevention Safety hospital delirium Source Type: news