- Title
- An assistant workforce to improve screening rates and quality of care for older patients in the emergency department: findings of a pre- post, mixed methods study
- Creator
- Hullick, Carolyn; Conway, Jane; Higgins, Isabel; Hewitt, Jacqueline; Stewart, Bernadette; Dilworth, Sophie; Attia, John
- Relation
- BMC Geriatrics Vol. 18, Issue 1, no. 126
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12877-018-0811-6
- Publisher
- BioMed Central
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2018
- Description
- Background: Older people who present to the Emergency Department (ED) experience high rates of prevalent and incident delirium. This study aimed to determine whether an assistant workforce in the ED could effectively conduct screening to inform assessment and care planning for older people as well as enhance supportive care activities for prevention of delirium. Methods: Using a pre-post design, data was collected before and after the introduction of Older Person Technical Assistants (OPTAs) in the ED. OPTA activity was recorded during the intervention period and a medical record audit undertaken prior to and 9 months after implementation. Data were analysed using descriptive statistics for OPTA activities. Weighted Kappa scores were calculated comparing concordance in screening scores between OPTAs and Aged Services Emergency Team Registered Nurses. Changes in the rates of documented screening and supportive care were analysed using Chi-square tests. Focus groups were conducted to explore clinicians’ experiences of the OPTA role. Results: Three thousand five hundred fourty two people were seen by OPTAs in 4563 ED Presentations between 1st July 2011 and 2012. The reproducibility of all screening tools were found to be high between the OPTAs and the RNs, with Kappas and ICCs generally all above 0.9. The medical record audit showed significant improvement in the rates of documented screening, including cognition from 1.5 to 38% (p < 0.001) and review of pain from 29 to 75% (p < 0.001). Supportive care such as being given fluids or food also improved from 13 to 49% (p < 0.001) and pressure care from 4.8 to 30% (p < 0.001). This was accomplished with no increase in ED length of stay among this age group. Focus group interviews described mixed responses and support for the OPTA role. Conclusions: An assistant workforce in an ED setting was found to provide comparable screening results and improve the rates of documented screening and supportive care provided to older people with or at risk of developing delirium in the ED. There is a need for a shared philosophy to the care of older people in the ED. Trial registration: Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registration number is ACTRN12617000742370. It was retrospectively registered on 22nd May 2017.
- Subject
- emergency services, hospital; comprehensive geriatric assessment; emergency department, aged; emergency nursing; caregivers; delirium; standard of care; assessment, nursing; older person; screening; delirium prevention
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1388735
- Identifier
- uon:32811
- Identifier
- ISSN:1471-2318
- Rights
- © 2018 The Author(s). This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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