There is often something endearing about the pleasantly confused elderly, at least in the short term. For us at least it makes a difference from the confusion that has little old ladies grabbing your testicles because you are obviously 'a Nazi come to take me to the gas chambers!'

We were called to one of our less regular warden controlled homes, I've been there a couple of times and have normally been impressed with the staff there, not just because I had a cup of tea and a cake once when I helped them out a little outside of what is normally expected of us.

It was two o'clock in the morning as we pulled into the parking area of the home. We'd noticed a little old man in a heavy coat pulling a wheeled basket being flummoxed by the automatic gate.

The warden, looking at the end of her tether came out to meet us. She pointed at the man, "There he is, he's confused and I can't do anything with him".

The patient didn't really want to go to hospital, he wanted to go for a walk. Chatting to him I could tell that he wasn't in a right frame of mind. My crewmate expertly took the warden off to one side and got the information that we needed. I on the other hand worked on the patient.

Luckily he didn't need much persuading, after a bit of a chat I found out that he had a long-running problem with his elbow. I explained that 'as we are here', it would be our pleasure to pop him down the hospital so they could have a look at him. He was a really pleasant bloke, and I enjoyed having a (slightly muddled) chat.

So we had a nice little journey down to the hospital where we discovered the probably source of his confusion.

Someone had cancelled his night-time sleeping pill. It's a well known effect of stopping sleeping pills that (particularly in the elderly) it can cause night-time confusion, agitation and wandering. I believe that an early episode of 'Scrubs' had a running joke to this effect. Still, at least the hospital could make sure that this was the cause for the confusion, not something more serious.