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Christine Lalonde (left), Clinical Care Leader, and RN Eva June Demegillo (right) take Minnie Hogan for a walk on 5NW at the General Campus, where the Move On Project has recently been introduced.

Patients who think they’re too sick to get out of bed. Families who urge patients to stay in bed to avoid the risk of falling. No one foresaw the barriers these attitudes posed for the Move On Project.

“We underestimated the importance of patient and family attitudes around getting out of bed,” said Education Coordinator Vicki Thomson, who is leading the pilot project that began at The Ottawa Hospital (TOH) last year on the geriatric and medicine units. The pilot phase is now complete and the project is being rolled out across TOH.

The goal is to get senior patients out of bed and moving as soon as possible to avoid pressure ulcers and loss of strength, reduce delirium and depression, and shorten hospital stays.

“We’re going to focus now on putting more energy and resources into educating families and patients,” Thomson said. “We also want to empower them to ask to get out of bed. And we’d like the family to encourage the patient to get up.”

During the pilot phase, the Move On team also learned the vital importance of:

• having strong unit leaders and mobility “champions”
• simplifying the documentation process, including recording consistently in the same place on the chart each time a patient was mobilized
• having the right equipment, such as enough patient and visitor chairs

“If a visitor comes in and there’s no visitor chair, they’ll sit in the patient chair and the patient will stay in bed,” said Thomson. “It’s especially good for patients to sit up while having visitors.”

TOH, one of 14 Ontario hospitals participating in the project, received praise from the mentor assigned to follow the team’s progress. “Something unique about TOH is that the Move On team included a senior manager (Fred Beauchemin, Clinical Director of Geriatrics, Short-term Rehab and Transitional Care),” said Julia Moore, who visited in June. This ensures the Move On message is communicated through all levels of the hospital.

See ‘Move On Project’ gets seniors out of bed and moving

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