Bringing Life to a Systemwide Early Mobility Clinical Practice: Part 1

An early mobility initiative has been recently instituted as a systemwide clinical practice at Banner Health (BH). This article demonstrates the development and implementation of an interdisciplinary team (IDT) approach for improving patient outcomes through a well-researched intervention like early mobilization of hospitalized patients at a large healthcare system. The development of this program was spearheaded by BH Hospital Medicine Clinical Consensus Group (CCG) based on a pilot program called virtual Acute Care of Elders (vACE) at our flagship academic medical center in Phoenix, AZ. Part 1 of this 2-part article focuses on the processes used by the Early Mobility Steering Committee (EM-SC) using the concepts of vACE, CCG, and nurse-driven Bedside Mobility Assessment Tool (BMAT) to implement safe mobilization. A clinical practice was thus developed that utilizes the four BMAT levels as a means for providing safe early mobility interventions by staff to patients throughout all BH hospitals reaching all admitted adults in non-critical care settings. Part 2 of this article will present the outcomes of this intervention at BH.

Turner R, Agarwal N, Agarwal S, Best L

Keywords: early mobility, systemwide SPHM sustainability, culture of safety, improved patient outcomes, quality improvement initiative