• Martin Christensen.
• School of Health and Human Sciences, Southern Cross University, New South Wales 2480, Australia. Electronic address: martin.christensen@scu.edu.au.
• Intensive Crit Care Nurs. 2014 Feb 1;30(1):54-60.

AimThe aim of this study was to establish intensive care unit nurses' knowledge of delirium within an acute tertiary hospital within South East Asia.BackgroundDelirium is a common, life threatening and often preventable cause of morbidity and mortality among older patients. Undetected and untreated delirium is a catalyst to increased mortality, morbidity, functional decline and results in increased requirement for nursing care, healthcare expense and hospital length of stay. However, despite effective assessment tools to identify delirium in the acute setting, there still remains an inability of ICU nurses' to accurately identify delirium in the critically ill patient especially that of hypoactive delirium.MethodA purposive sample of 53 staff nurses from a 13-bedded medical intensive care unit within an acute tertiary teaching hospital in South East Asia were asked to participate. A 40 item 5-point Likert scale questionnaire was employed to determine the participants' knowledge of the signs and symptoms; the risk factors and negative outcomes of delirium.ResultsThe overall positively answered mean score was 27 (67.3%) out of a possible 40 questions. Mean scores for knowledge of signs and symptoms, risk factors and negative outcomes were 9.52 (63.5%, n=15), 11.43 (63.5%, n=17) and 6.0 (75%, n=8), respectively.ConclusionWhilst the results of this study are similar to others taken from a western perspective, it appeared that the ICU nurses in this study demonstrated limited knowledge of the signs and symptoms, risk factors and negative outcomes of delirium in the critically patient. The implications for practice of this are important given the outcomes of untreated delirium.Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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