Background: Hospitalized patients have been shown to spend an average of 83% of their stay in bed(1), leading to loss of independence in activities of daily living and lower rates of discharge to home(2,3). Given staff shortages within the hospital setting and our desire to inspire prioritization of mobility in future healthcare providers, we hypothesized that health profession students could safely advance inpatient mobility.
Purpose: To initiate and evaluate an innovative, interprofessional mobility curriculum targeting health profession students to mobilize hospitalized patients.
Description: Our mobility course was offered to all health profession students across campus. The course consisted of one lecture by a physician reviewing literature on mobility, followed by a demonstration of interprofessional communication and appropriate mobilization techniques for ambulatory inpatients by a physical therapist (PT). PT evaluated the students to ensure correct performance of patient mobilization. Thereafter, students independently mobilized hospitalized patients with nursing evaluated Activity Measure for Post Acute Care (AM-PAC) score >17, indicating the patient is ambulatory. Twelve students completed the course in its first iteration (3 PT students, 9 OT students). 503 ambulation events were recorded with no reported falls. Students demonstrated improved knowledge regarding interpretation of AM-PAC scores (pre 33.3%, post 91.7%), improved confidence communicating interprofessionally (pre 33.3%, post 91.7% strongly agree), and improved confidence safely ambulating patients (pre 33.3%, post 75% strongly agree). Furthermore, 91.7% of the students strongly agreed the course increased awareness of the importance of mobilizing patients. An 8-item hands-on evaluation of mobilization demonstrated improvement of skills (average score: pre 2.17/5, post 4.25/5 – a rating of 4/5 indicated “completes skill well, in a timely manner”). Results from this pilot has led to the Dean of the College of Health Professions committing 60 physical therapy students to help with mobility at our academic medical center. In the first day of service, these PT students mobilized 50 hospitalized patients.
Conclusions: Our pilot study of health profession students who completed a mobility curriculum showed improvement in mobilization skills and an increase in confidence applying AM-PAC scores, communicating interprofessionally, and mobilizing patients. Results from this pilot study has the potential to be replicated at other academic medical centers to improve mobility in hospitalized patients.