High-risk patients can be given a delirium toolbox designed to encourage appropriate stimulations, including pocket talkers (audio amplification devices), reading glasses, earplugs, nightlights, flashlights, cards, puzzles, and Play-Doh–brand modeling compound.
For daytime, patients can be furnished with radios, preloaded MP3 players with speakers, DVD players, white-noise generators, and games and puzzles for stimulation.
One of the most cost-effective measures is sitter-training, with bedside aides instructed about how to recognize delirium and engage the patient through reading, conversation, playing music, and providing stimulation, rather than sitting mutely and passively by.
Although no one-size-fits-all solution exists to prevent delirium, taking action to prevent it, and, when necessary, to treat it, is critically important, Dr. Loreck emphasized.
"You don’t have to do everything, but do something," he said.
Neither Dr. Loreck nor Dr. Alici had conflicts of interest to disclose.