After completing the program, I am more knowledgeable about what goes into delirium prevention. Before I knew that we need to reorient our patients, now I know how to do that and I’ve had practice doing it. I think the help nurses do a good job of emphasizing how we can reorient patients throughout the day without the need to directly say it’s 5 oclock now. For example, if a patient has a window we can talk about rush hour traffic or at the beginning of the year I did a session and if we were talking about their grandkids I said they must have started school recently, what grades are they in.
I thought the most meaningful part was just going into the room and being able to talk to the patients for a while. On my last session I spent 45 minutes with a gentleman who worked with inmates teaching social studies so they could earn their GED’s. That was interesting and it’s something that I would probably never have time to do during the day if I had him for clinical. Yes, while I was in there I was doing a checklist but I felt like that was secondary. By talking to the patients, I could check off a lot of the boxes I was going to ask about anyways.
My two goals were to get a better understanding of the interventions nurses can do on the floor to prevent delirium and to get a better sense of what a day is like in the hospital for an older adult. I think I met both of those goals. Through the help program I learned about the importance of the sleep wake cycle, reorienting, making sure they get sunlight, and ambulating the patient amongst other things. I did all of my shifts from 3-6 which is always after I’m done with clinical for the week. While I was there I got to ask them about what they did that day, did PT stop by, that sort of thing. Overall I would say it was a success.
