Consultant in Emergency & Interface Frailty Medicine; Clinical Director, Integrated Services Wye Valley NHS Trust, UK Leominster, England
Disclosure(s):
Linda Dykes, MBBS (Hons) FRCEM: No financial relationships to disclose
Geriatric Giants: Frailty, Delirium, and Encouraging Patients to #Havetheconversation
The Baby Boomers are getting old, and as they do so, are coming into increasing contact with all medical services, including EMS. And older patients are getting more complex - multiple co-morbidities and a medication list that resembles a shopping list are commonplace. Even the so-called "Geriatric Giants" have changed since they were direct described in 1965... today there are four: frailty, sarcopenia, the anorexia of ageing, and cognitive impairment. From these are derived the kind of problems we see in EMS and EM: falls, hip fractures, delirium, and increased morbidity and mortality.
This talk covers the concept of frailty, explains delirium and how it may present (it's not always a UTI!), and covers a wide range of Geriatric pearls, plus practical tips and tricks to help EMS clinicians provide better care for our senior patients, both at work and as part of wider society... including practical suggestions about how EMS clinicians are ideally placed to encourage end-of-life planning.
This talk is fast paced, regularly updated, and covers material that is ever more vital to EMS clinicians everywhere.
Learning Objectives:
Define the concept of frailty, describe how to use the Rockwood Clinical Frailty Scale, and list importan timplications of frailty
Describe hypoactive and hyperactive delirium, and list important possible causes
Demonstrate use of on-line tools to assess the cumulative anti-cholinergic burden of apatient's medications, such as acbcalc.com, and understand why this is important.
