Use of Early Mobilisation to Reduce Incidence of Hospital Acquired Pneumonia in Medical Inpatients

Hospital acquired pneumonia (HAP) is a common complication of extended hospital stay. In surgical specialities and critical care early physiotherapy is a recognised way of preventing such infections, and reducing length of hospital stay (LOS), however prevention of this problem is less well studied in medical inpatients.

The investigators propose a pilot study to assess the impact of introducing an early mobilisation strategy to general medical and respiratory wards at an acute Trust in the United Kingdom (UK). The investigators will recruit all new admissions to each of 2 respiratory and 2 elderly care wards - 1 of each ward type will be allocated to receive extra physiotherapy input targeting new admissions for early mobilisation. Patients' usual mobility, current mobility and actual activity levels will be studied by accelerometer and simple patient questionnaire in the first 48 hours of admission, and compared between groups. Incidence of HAP and total LOS will be recorded and compared between groups.

The investigators hypotheses are that the physiotherapy intervention will increase activity levels, reduce incidence of HAP and reduce LOS. The latter may result in cost savings to the National Health Service (NHS), which the investigators will model using local tariff data.

The investigators plan to use our data to power a larger randomised controlled study, or if the intervention is a marked success, such that a control group would be unethical, then a wider service development and evaluation programme.