Site Manager - Therapy Services Penn Medicine Rehabilitation - Good Shepherd Penn Partners, United States
Research Objectives: To increase patients being mobilized more on the weekends by nursing staff outside of their therapy times.
Design: We used a qualitative approach where we looked back at the problem or need and introduced a tool to increase percentage of patients being mobilized.
Setting: The setting includes both the acute rehabilitation floors (general rehab and brain injury) and long term acute care hospital (LTACH). All units are inpatient hospital settings.
Participants: Patients included are selected by therapists who can ambulate but cannot do so yet independently and do not need an extensive amount of physical assist. The initiative has been ongoing for a few years with average number of patients enrolled on the rehab floors to be about 10 per week and 3 patients enrolled on the LTACH floor per week.
Interventions: Collaborated with nursing leadership on ways to communicate patient's ambulation status more visibly to nursing staff. A weekend walking grid is completed by therapists and emailed to nursing staff every Friday. In addition, signs are posted at the nurse's stations on who should be offered to walk. Whiteboards in the patient's rooms are updated regarding ambulation status.
Main Outcome Measures: Number of patients offered to walk and who were walked on the weekends by nursing staff. These numbers are collected via patient report and the electronic medical record (documentation by RN or CNA).
Results: Prior to interventions, patients were not consistently mobilized on the weekends. Post interventions, patients are mobilized 25-100% of the time on weekends.
Conclusions: Use of collaborative effort and multiple forms of communication help increase awareness of which patients are appropriate to be mobilized more and how to do so safely. Patients who are enrolled and participate have an improved sense that they were “more productive” on the weekends, maintain their mobility, and demonstrate this carryover to their therapy sessions during the week.
Author(s) Disclosures: None
Learning Objectives:
Identify interventions to implement weekend walking program in their facilities.
Identify patients who would be appropriate to enroll in weekend walking program.
Adapt strategies learned for implementation at their facility.
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