Clinical Research Directory

A Clinical Decision Support Tool for Assessing the Ability to Decide on Returning Home in Elderly Patients with Cognitive Impairments

No validated and generalized tool for assessing a patient's ability to decide whether to return home after hospitalization exists. Evaluating the capacity of elderly patients to decide on their own return home is a daily concern for geriatricians. Neurocognitive disorders do not necessarily mean an inability to decide and the MMSE (mini mental state examination), a reference scale for screening neurocognitive disorders, is not sufficient to determine decision-making capacity apart from extreme scores. Depending on the stage or type of neurocognitive disorders, the same stages of the decision-making process (understanding, reasoning, appreciation, choice) are not impacted. The ability to decide depends on the type of decision (deciding to vote, deciding to take a medication, to participate in clinical research, etc.), i.e. domain-dependent. Associating the clinician's clinical decision with a standardized tool for assessing patients' capacity to decide would enable more ethical clinical practice. the aim of the study is to add to the clinical decision a decision support tool to assess the capacity to decide whether to return home has better sensitivity in the assessment of the capacity to decide than that of clinical assessment alone