Organizational barriers and enablers of adult mobility in general acute hospital units: a scoping review.

The authors did not assess the quality of the 51 included studies. That is standard for a scoping review, but it means you cannot tell how much weight to put on any single finding underneath it. Most of what is reported comes from bedside nursing staff and patients (39% and 35% of participants). Only 4% were physical therapists and 2% occupational therapists, and 15 of the 45 primary studies used a single informant group, so the picture is largely built from nursing and patient views. Only 7 of the 51 studies defined mobility, and their definitions disagreed. The barriers reported may relate to quite different activities, from turning in bed to walking off the ward. Studies from intensive care, rehabilitation, single conditions and single wards were excluded, as were non-English and unpublished reports. The authors state the findings are not representative of all acute care contexts, and specialist units such as geriatric wards may be missed. The review counts how many studies mentioned a barrier, not how much that barrier matters in practice, and it reports what people said rather than testing whether removing a barrier changes anything. The search stopped in October 2024.

Funded by Flinders University and the Southern Adelaide Local Health Network. The authors state the funders had no role in the review. No competing interests are declared in the supplied text.

Do not read the list of enablers in this review as things that have been shown to work. It maps what 51 studies reported, mostly through interviews and surveys, without appraising the quality of those studies or measuring any patient outcome, and no intervention was tested here. The review's own conclusion is that addressing single barriers in isolation is unlikely to be effective.