Clinical Practice Guidelines on Delirium - Consensus and Gaps: A Scoping Review Protocol

<ns3:p> Background Delirium is a fluctuating neuropsychiatric syndrome, with significant consequences including increased mortality, prolonged hospitalization, and long-term cognitive decline. Despite being a serious yet reversible syndrome, delirium is often poorly managed. Clinical practice guidelines providing evidence-based recommendations have become increasingly important for improving healthcare quality, consistency, and cost-effectiveness. The implementation of high-quality guidelines can play a crucial role in delivering good delirium care. Objective To identify national or major regional delirium clinical practice guidelines, relating to an adult population, appraise their development process, and identify areas of consensus/disagreement and gaps in their coverage of topics and recommendations. Methods Reporting will comply with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR) Checklist. Systematic literature searches will be carried out in four academic databases (Medline Ovid, Embase, CINAHL EBSCO and PsycInfo EBSCO) and 19 grey literature sources comprising databases (TRIP, Google Scholar, Google), guideline repositories, delirium organisation websites and other sources. Two reviewers will independently perform title and abstract screening, then full text screening, against defined eligibility criteria. Data will be charted using standardised forms. Due to the nature of the scoping review, ethical approval is not required. This protocol was registered with Open Science Framework <ns3:ext-link xmlns:ns4="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" ext-link-type="uri" ns4:href="https://osf.io/kfh3m">https://osf.io/kfh3m</ns3:ext-link> . Discussion This scoping review will contribute data to a larger project aimed at developing an international clinical practice guideline for delirium. Results from this scoping review will be disseminated in a peer-reviewed journal and at international conferences. </ns3:p>