On Wednesday 11th March 2020 we celebrated World Delirium Day. Delirium is a rapid change in brain function, which primarily affects the ability to focus attention; and is now being recognised globally as a significant issue in healthcare, particularly on Intensive Care Units (ICU) whereby up to 75% of patients are at risk of developing delirium.
World Delirium Day, organised by iDelirium, the International Federation of Delirium Societies, is an international effort to raise awareness of delirium among patients, carers, healthcare professionals, administrators and policymakers.
iDelirium seeks to:
- Advocate for delirium with a unified voice
- Build an understanding of the global economic implications of delirium
- Collaborate to advance delirium science
- Develop international programming for delirium
- Educate patients, caregivers, professionals and policymakers about delirium
Events such as World Delirium Day are vitally important in raising awareness at a time when the wellbeing of critical care patients has never been more important.
As part of creating our new ICU at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital we have carefully designed the clinical environment to reduce the potential for patients to develop delirium. We are leading several new projects which aim to improve the diagnosis and treatment of delirium. This includes state-of-the-art, non-invasive eye tracking technology which will improve methods of identifying delirium and the use of Virtual Reality (VR) to improve quality of sleep for at-risk and suffering patients. We have also partnered with Sonitus, Sensyne and Testo to monitor the ICU environment, including light, noise, temperature and air quality.
Read more about our projects surrounding delirium here. We look forward to contributing to research surrounding delirium and improving clinical and non-clinical understandings, identification, treatment and prevention.
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