My knowledge of delirium and preventative factors didn’t really change throughout my involvement in this program. Just that there are many preventative factors that you can help the patient with, so they don’t develop a delirious state. Something as simple as waking the patient from a daytime nap will help them sleep better at night and potentially prevent delirium. Another thing that is helpful to the patients may be starting your conversation with something like “good morning, happy Friday, it’s crazy that it is already the 4^th of November.” This is reorienting them to what day it is and what month we are in without confronting them that they don’t know what day it is.

The most meaningful aspect of this experience was just simply creating conversation with some of the older folks in the hospital. But it was also difficult in some instances because I would get patients who had already been seen at least twice and we essentially were supposed to address the same things at every visit. So, the patients would get annoyed and not want to talk. There was one patient that I asked him if there was anything I could do to make his hospital stay better and he said yes for me to leave and tell the others to not come back as well. I was kind of shocked, but I also understood, because having someone from the HELP program go in up to three times a day can be very overwhelming, and in that case, it is more stressful and has a negative impact over a positive one. That’s not counting the nurse, CNA, doctor that go in to see the patients as well.

The only part of my learning goals that I met were using patient centered care. I will integrate this in the future because that is how you should treat all patients, remember that they are a disease with a bunch of lab values or vital signs. They are a person and should be treated like one. My first goal was to observe and learn from the nurses there. That was not met because we were sent off on our own to complete these tasks with the patient. Something that could have happened differently and to get a better learning experience is to actually go with the HELP employees and see how they do things.