Reevaluation of a clinical resource for assessment of delirium, dementia, and depression.

There is a perennial need to extend geriatrics knowledge and expertise to primary care providers to meet the unique needs of older patients. Reaching the target population of providers in an effective manner presents challenges for educators and evaluation of education programs. Gaps in a previous dissemination of an Assessment Guide for delirium, dementia, and depression were addressed through a multimodal strategy to reach a greater proportion of the intended audience, primary care clinicians, and to further evaluate the clinical impact of this learning resource. Sixty-five health care providers completed a forced choice online questionnaire. The majority of respondents were primary care providers (62.5%) who used the Assessment Guide in clinical activities such as patient assessment and patient education. Semistructured interviews with selected key informants (N = 16) provided examples of clinical impact such as improved diagnosis and changes in medication.

Dissemination strategies: the evolution of learning resources on the evaluation of delirium, dementia, and depression.

Clinicians experience great pressures to provide timely, effective, and evidence-based medical care. Educators can aid these clinicians through the development of new tools that can facilitate timely completion of clinical tasks. These tools should summarize evidence-based information in a convenient format that allows easy use. This article describes one process in which a group of Geriatric Research, Education, and Clinical Center educators identified an area where important new information accrued, their development of a new clinical and teaching tool for imparting the new information, the initial dissemination of the tool to a preliminary target audience, and the initial evaluation of the new tool to determine how to improve its distribution and use beyond the original target audience.