DCQ — Delirium Caregiver Questionnaire
2021A staged caregiver telephone-triage questionnaire with a seven-item form and a three-item short option. It was designed for older outpatients with cognitive impairment rather than bedside hospital assessment.
Related context
Telephone/outpatient caregiver triage rather than bedside 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 Caregiver Questionnaire is a purpose-built telephone triage tool for caregivers of older outpatients referred because of cognitive concerns. It uses a staged seven-item decision process and can be completed in under two minutes. The investigators also explored a shorter three-item route. Its purpose is to identify people who need urgent face-to-face assessment; it does not make a final diagnosis remotely.
Luijendijk and colleagues developed the questionnaire in one cohort and evaluated the final version in a subsequent cohort, with clinicians establishing delirium diagnoses while blinded to questionnaire results. The seven-item form had sensitivity and specificity of 73.5%. A three-item analysis gave sensitivity of 79.6% and specificity of 70.8%, although performance depended on complete caregiver reporting of key symptoms. The study also found that delirious patients were assessed sooner after DCQ introduction.
DCQ is a genuine delirium tool omitted by a bedside-only rule. It should be added to remote, outpatient and informant context, not silently mixed with hospital bedside tests. The page can state the form lengths, staged triage purpose, timing and accuracy without reproducing the questions. A positive result means urgent clinical assessment is warranted; a negative result cannot safely exclude delirium when caregiver information is incomplete or symptoms are fluctuating.
Evidence and practical details
- Full name
- Delirium Caregiver Questionnaire
- Catalogue class
- Related context
- Record type
- context-related
- Family
- dcq-family
- Purpose
- Informant / caregiver-based, Screening / case-finding
- Population
- Older outpatients with cognitive impairment and their caregivers
- Setting
- Outpatient / remote
- Items
- —
- Administration
- <2 min
- Evidence
- No eligible DTA study identified
- Evidence maturity
- single-DTA
- Evidence stage
- contextual-validation-or-psychometric-evidence
- DTA studies identified
- 0
- Reference type
- Canonical source or first evaluation
- Cut-off / scoring
- Staged triage decision rather than a simple summed threshold
- Original/source citation
- Luijendijk HJ, Quispel-Aggenbach DWP, Stroomer-van Wijk AJM, Meijerink-Blom AH, van Walbeek A, Zuidema SU A short delirium caregiver questionnaire for triage of elderly outpatients with cognitive impairment: a development and test accuracy study International Psychogeriatrics. 2021;33(1):31-37. PMID 31658916
Format and clearly labelled links
Rights, version and permission record
- Instrument access state
- Verified open article containing the instrument
- Instrument host
- Cambridge University Press / PubMed Central (primary open article)
- Current instrument/version note
- Final seven-item Delirium Caregiver Questionnaire (published 2021)
- Rights holder
- International Psychogeriatric Association (article copyright statement)
- 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: Article content may be used under CC BY 4.0; clinical implementation must still follow the validated population 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 link and change notice.
- Translation/adaptation: Permitted under CC BY 4.0; identify changes and do not imply author endorsement.
- EHR/software integration: Copyright licence permits adaptation, but implementation validity and governance are separate and were not established by this rights review.
- Commercial use: Permitted by CC BY 4.0 subject to its terms.
Attribution supplied for permitted reuse: Delirium Caregiver Questionnaire, Luijendijk HJ, Quispel-Aggenbach DWP, Stroomer-van Wijk AJM, Meijerink-Blom AH, van Walbeek A and Zuidema SU, International Psychogeriatrics 2021;33:31-37, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1041610219001595, 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.