Investigating nurses' knowledge and attitudes about Delirium in older persons: A cross-sectional study

Abstract Introduction: Delirium is the most common emergency problem for elderly hospitalized patients, which needs urgent treatment, otherwise it can lead to negative patient outcomes. Nurses through their knowledge and competencies are in a key position for early recognition of delirium facilitating the appropriate treatment and management. Aim This study aims to increase the understanding of delirium care by exploring both knowledge and attitudes of nurses toward patients in acute care hospital wards and the possible association between these two variables. Method The Nurses Knowledge of Delirium Questionnaire (NKD) and the Attitude Tool of Delirium (ATOD) that was developed for the study purposes, were disseminated to 835 nurses in the four biggest Public Hospitals of the Republic, working in departments with increased frequency of delirium (response rate = 67%). Results Nurses' knowledge of acute confusion/delirium is limited. The average of the correct answers was 42.2%. Only 38% of the participants reported a correct definition of delirium, 41,6 correctly reported the tools to identify delirium and 42.5 answered correctly on the factors leading to delirium development. The results of the attitudes questionnaire showed that their attitudes towards patients with delirium weren’t positive. A correlation between the level of nurses’ knowledge and attitudes was also found. Factors found to influence the level of knowledge and attitudes were gender, education, and workplace. Conclusions The findings of this study are useful for the international audience since they can be used to develop educational programs that can focus on the specific knowledge deficits and attitudes towards patients with delirium. The development of a valid and reliable instrument for the measurement of attitudes also offers the possibility of assessing nurses’ attitudes further. Nationally, the results are even more important and useful since there are no data on the subject area and this study is the first of this kind in the country.