Picking up on post #54, it does seem that when a PWD has an infection causing more confusion / Delirium it leaves permanent damage even when the infection appears to have been treated in that the PWD never fully gets back to his/her previous ‘baseline’. I think that this happened to my elderly friend last year. She had a fall and an admission to hospital in January and never really picked up fully after that. Things were probably exacerbated by the lockdown (she lives alone and saw no one - all her friends were shielding - except for when she went to the shops or we dropped off her shopping and had a few words on the doorstep), and she was diagnosed with AD after two telephone assessments in May of the same year.
A bugbear of mine is that hospitals discharge frail people before their infections are fully eradicated. They are prescribed oral antibiotics, and on the discharge summary there is an instruction that the GP review the person but, in my experience, there’s never any follow up to see whether the infection has actually cleared. As a result, infections persist and there’s often another admission to hospital, following another fall or episode of Delirium, within a few days of discharge.
A bugbear of mine is that hospitals discharge frail people before their infections are fully eradicated. They are prescribed oral antibiotics, and on the discharge summary there is an instruction that the GP review the person but, in my experience, there’s never any follow up to see whether the infection has actually cleared. As a result, infections persist and there’s often another admission to hospital, following another fall or episode of Delirium, within a few days of discharge.