Good morning Mrs. Jones. How are you feeling this morning?
When people are sick and need to be treated in hospital,
they feel weak, fatigued, even exhausted,
and most of us can imagine how that feels. What most people don't realize,
though, is that lying in bed
isn't helpful for your recovery, and actually hinders your recovery.
So, the best thing patients can do is to try to get up
out of bed even if they're feeling weak and tired. They should sit at the edge of
the bed and dangle their legs over the edge.
They should get up to a chair and eat their meals in a chair,
or better yet, go for a short walk. If you're worried about getting up on your own,
patients should push the call bell and ask the nurse for help.
Sitting up in a chair will make you feel like you have more energy.
You'll feel less dizzy and less week.
The general myth around recovery is that if you stay in bed,
the more rest you get, the quicker you get better. That is actually not true.
From my experience, even though the first steps are the most difficult ones to take,
they're the most important ones.
Because the earlier you start mobilizing the patients,
the earlier they can get out of hospitals.
Family members might say how mom and dad need to stay in bed to get rest.
What I see if they can actually develop hospital-acquired complications.
It take them longer to recover
because they've now become medically declined.
We always, always encourage you to get up for meals,
get up to go to bathroom, get up to what you normally would do at home.
If you want to take a walk or get the paper,
it is really, really important that you continue to do that, because it is key
to your recovery and key to your discharge.
One third of our patients who come into the hospital develop a new disability because they're not moving.
Therefore, this threatens their ability to return home
and return to their prior functioning. So, it's very, very important that we focus
on early mobilization. That means within 24 hours of admission to the hospital
and daily mobilization. This doesn't need to be walking around the hallways
ten times a day, it simply means getting up for all the meals,
getting up to walk to the bathroom, getting up to walk to the nurses station.
All these little bits of activity help to ensure successful transition to home.
So, the challenge that we're trying to tackle is how can we optimize
mobilization of older patients who come into hospital,
because we know that the rate of mobilization for older people is
unacceptably low.
So, as soon as we admit patients to hospital, what do we do? We put them to bed.
And one of the challenges then is that,
on average, once patients are admitted to hospital, they're upright
only about 30 minutes a day.
When people are immobile while in hospital, in particular older people,
for every day that they spend in bed, they probably lose about one to five per cent
of their muscle strength. So they lose their ability to participate in self-care,
to walk,
to be able to be independent in the community. And so there's good evidence
to suggest that if we mobilize these people,
while they're in hospital, we can decrease their length of stay in hospital,
we can maintain their independence
and promote their discharge back to the community. So, it's a crucially important
thing that we're trying to encourage in our older populations.