DBS-HCP — Delirium Burden Scale for Healthcare Providers
2025A 22-item self-report measure of delirium-related burden experienced by physicians and nurses on adult general wards. It measures staff and organisational burden, not patient delirium.
Related context
Healthcare-provider burden measure rather than a patient assessment. This profile remains public for clinical and bibliographic context, but it does not add to the headline count of independent core families.
What this tool is and how to interpret its evidence
The Delirium Burden Scale for Healthcare Providers (DBS-HCP) is a self-report measure of the burden experienced by physicians and nurses when treating or caring for patients with delirium on general hospital wards. It measures staff experience and organisational pressure; it is not a delirium detection, diagnosis or patient-severity instrument. The final scale contains 22 statements rated on a five-point agreement scale. Equally weighted responses produce a total from 22 to 110, with higher scores representing greater burden. Twelve items form a patient-associated burden factor and ten form an institution-derived burden factor. No validated clinical cutoff has been proposed.
Ueda and colleagues developed a 25-item draft through literature review, qualitative work, expert interviews and pilot testing. In the main Japanese survey, 311 physicians and 311 nurses completed the draft. Exploratory factor analysis produced the 22-item form. Internal consistency was high for the patient-associated and institution-derived factors, with alpha values of .93 and .89. Scores varied in expected directions by profession and delirium caseload. Correlation with the Japanese Burnout Scale was modest at .34, supporting related but non-identical constructs.
This remains a new measure developed in one country using self-report data, and independent cross-cultural and intervention-responsiveness studies are needed. The page should disclose the authors' and study contractors' relationships with MSD K.K. DBS-HCP can support workforce and organisational research but cannot determine whether an individual patient has delirium.
Evidence and practical details
- Full name
- Delirium Burden Scale for Healthcare Providers
- Catalogue class
- Related context
- Record type
- context-related
- Family
- delirium-care-strain-measures
- Purpose
- Detailed research assessment
- Population
- Adult
- Setting
- General / acute hospital
- Items
- 22
- Administration
- self-completed; formal time not reported
- Evidence
- No eligible DTA study identified
- Evidence maturity
- psychometric-validation
- Evidence stage
- contextual-validation-or-psychometric-evidence
- DTA studies identified
- 0
- Reference type
- Development and psychometric validation in a national Japanese survey
- Validation sample
- n = 622 respondents: 311 physicians and 311 nurses
- Cut-off / scoring
- No validated cutoff; higher values indicate greater burden
- Original/source citation
- Ueda N, Tazaki I, LoPresti M, Shibuya Y, Tokita S, Ogawa A, Okuda S Development and validation of the Delirium Burden Scale for Healthcare Providers (DBS-HCP) PCN Reports. 2025;4(4):e70226. PMID 41132521
Format and clearly labelled links
Rights, version and permission record
- Instrument access state
- Verified open article containing the instrument
- Instrument host
- Wiley / PubMed Central (open article and supporting information)
- Current instrument/version note
- Final Japanese 22-item DBS-HCP published in 2025
- Rights holder
- Merck & Co., Inc. (article copyright statement; no separate instrument notice located)
- Licence / rights basis
- CC-BY-4.0 ↗
- Rights checked
- 2026-07-19
- Rights-holder contact
- Not yet verified
Permission scope recorded at the last check
- Clinical use: Copyright reuse is permitted under CC BY 4.0 with attribution; clinical use remains subject to language validation, population fit and local governance.
- Research use: Permitted under CC BY 4.0 with citation and attribution.
- Web republication: Permitted under CC BY 4.0 with attribution, source and licence links, and identification of changes, subject to any separate supplementary-material credit line.
- Translation/adaptation: Permitted under CC BY 4.0 with attribution and change notice, but a translation requires linguistic and psychometric validation.
- EHR/software integration: Copyright adaptation is permitted, but implementation validity and governance are separate.
- Commercial use: Permitted by CC BY 4.0 subject to its terms and any separately credited third-party material.
Attribution supplied for permitted reuse: Delirium Burden Scale for Healthcare Providers, Development and validation of the Delirium Burden Scale for Healthcare Providers (DBS-HCP), PCN Reports 2025, https://doi.org/10.1002/pcn5.70226, licensed under CC BY 4.0. Identify any changes.
Site-text licence boundary: the CC BY 4.0 notice for original deliriumtools.com editorial text does not cover third-party instruments, item wording, forms, article text, logos, screenshots or linked material.
Page record and review status
- Page version
- 3.1.0
- Last factual/source check
- 2026-07-19
- Last rights/link check
- 2026-07-19
- Curator and responsible editor
- Professor Alasdair M J MacLullich — Curator factual and source review complete (not an independent external reviewer)
- Independent external clinical review
- Not yet completed. No independent external reviewer, consortium endorsement or institutional endorsement is claimed.
Corrections and rights-holder notices can be submitted through the contribute and corrections page.
* Where shown, sensitivity/specificity are from the cited evaluation and are not pooled estimates. “DTA studies identified” describes the current audit, not a completed systematic-review count. Citation metadata checked against PubMed or a publisher record does not imply validation, study quality, endorsement or suitability for a setting. See Methodology.