Journal Club: The Sedentary Hospital Patient

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In keeping with the most recent post regarding Casey’s thoughts about faith at work in the acute care setting, today we will briefly discuss an interesting systematic review related to acute care work.

For those of you that work in acute care this may come as no surprise, but patients that become admitted to the hospital become rather sedentary very, very quickly. Staying in the hospital bed can lead to all kinds of issues - weakness, deconditioning, difficulty breathing, etc. and all of these things are essentially byproducts of a sedentary lifestyle.

Enter you, the physical therapist. You enter a hospital room with the understanding and skill set to begin to offset a patient’s sedentary predicament. So, my goal with today’s post is to not provide exercises or methodologies to help because you already know how to help someone combat effects of being sedentary. The article today focuses on just how sedentary hospitalized patients can become during their stay. It’s kind of mind boggling.

Systematic Review of Sedentary Patients in the Hospital

We see in this systematic review that patients really are quite sedentary patients spending 93-98% of their time in sedentary positions. That is a whole lot of sedentary! Some studies cited patients that do get up and break the sedentary cycle will still perform less than 1000 steps during the hospital stay. So there is not a lot of movement and exercise happening. 

Use this quantified data of what we intuitively knew to be true to inspire you to continue working hard moving and exercising patients because every bit you do will impact their function after discharge from the hospital.

Jason

***Check out my new book "Rehab the World" written for Physical Therapists to encourage us in our workplace and prepare us to serve those around us. If you like, please leave a review and spread the word!!***

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