Helping you to assess cognition : a practical toolkit for clinicians practical toolkit for clinicians [E-book]

It can be difficult for health professionals to accurately assess cognitive function in older people. Yet this is one of the most important assessments clinicians make, particularly those working in old age psychiatry and geriatric medicine. It is essential to detecting dementia. Cognitive assessments cover a very broad range of activities. They can take place in a number of settings: primary care, specialist memory clinics, acute care and care homes; for a variety of purposes: screening, diagnosing, staging and measuring change; over a number of domains: memory, language, visuospatial ability and executive function. There are a number of assessment scales available but none of them cover this broad range of use. In addition, some scales have a cost attached to them which hinders their use in clinical practice. This includes the widely used Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE). The cognitive assessment toolkit has been developed for health professionals to help them decide on the most appropriate cognitive assessment tool for use with their patients in their setting. The aim of the toolkit is to support clinicians in improving assessment of cognition in a wide variety of settings. The toolkit was created by an expert writing group and supported by Department of Health. The toolkit is intended as a guide to assessment, and not for diagnosis per se.