Multicomponent, nonpharmacological delirium interventions for older inpatients: A scoping review

BACKGROUND: Older people represent a risk group for acquiring or further development of delirium during hospitalization, therefore requiring suitable nonpharmacological delirium interventions. OBJECTIVE: This scoping review analyzed nonpharmacological intervention programs for older inpatients with or without cognitive decline on regular or acute geriatric wards to present the range of interventions. METHODS: A systematic literature search was conducted using scientific databases. A total of 4652 records were screened by two independent reviewers, leaving 81 eligible articles for full-text screening and 25 studies were finally included. Inclusion criteria were older patients ≥65 years in regular or acute geriatric wards and nonpharmacological multicomponent interventions. RESULTS: More than a half of the included studies (14, 56%) recruited patients with pre-existing cognitive decline as part of the study population and 12% focused exclusively on patients with cognitive decline. On average 11 intervention components were integrated in the programs and two programs included full coverage of all 18 identified components. CONCLUSION: Only few programs were described for older inpatients and even fewer regarding pre-existing cognitive decline. The low numbers of interventions and data heterogeneity restricted the assessment of outcomes; however, delirium incidence, as reported by two thirds of the studies was reduced by nonpharmacological multicomponent interventions. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1007/s00391-019-01627-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.