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Written by Tristan Hulbert, Vivid.Care. Author of “The Healthcare Professional’s Complete Guide to Specialist Seating Assessments”. Last updated: 3 August 2026.
This page collects the key studies, statistics and national guidance on hospital deconditioning, each with a named and dated source you can check. Every figure comes with what the study actually measured and a note on how it should and shouldn’t be used, because a lot of deconditioning statistics get quoted well beyond what their source supports. None of it is gated. Take whatever is useful, and cite the original rather than us.
It’s a reference page rather than an article, and we review it monthly. If you spot an error, tell us and we’ll correct it and note what changed.
| Statistic | Source | What it actually measured | Use with care |
|---|---|---|---|
| Around 1 in 3 patients aged over 70 is discharged with a new disability in an activity of daily living | Covinsky KE, Pierluissi E, Johnston CB. Hospitalization-associated disability. JAMA, 2011;306(16):1782-1793. | A synthesis of cohort studies comparing pre-admission ADL function with function at discharge in older medical inpatients. | It’s a synthesis rather than a single trial, and the underlying cohorts are mostly North American. It shows association, not proof that the hospital stay caused the disability. Don’t present it as a UK figure. |
| Older inpatients spent a median of 83% of measured time lying in bed, with a median of 43 minutes a day standing or walking | Brown CJ, Redden DT, Flood KL, Allman RM. Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, 2009;57(9):1660-1665. | Accelerometry on older medical inpatients, measuring actual position and movement rather than documented mobility. Most participants were able to walk. | A single-centre US study with a modest sample. The 83% is a proportion of measured time, not of the whole admission. Its strength is that it’s objective measurement rather than a notes review, which is why it’s worth quoting. |
| Around 0.95kg of lean leg mass lost over 10 days of bed rest | Kortebein P, Ferrando A, Lombeida J, Wolfe R, Evans WJ. JAMA, 2007;297(16):1772-1774. | Strict bed rest in healthy community-dwelling older volunteers, average age 67, with DXA measurement of lean mass plus strength and power testing. | These were healthy volunteers rather than acutely unwell patients, and they were well fed throughout. Real inpatients would be expected to do worse, but this study doesn’t demonstrate that. Quote it as what bed rest on its own does. |
| Up to 65% of older patients experience functional decline during a hospital admission | British Geriatrics Society, 2017 and subsequent Deconditioning Hub resources. | A position and awareness figure drawn from the wider literature rather than a single primary dataset. | This is the top of a range, and it comes from an advocacy resource rather than a primary study. Cite the BGS as saying it, and present it as a range alongside the Covinsky figure rather than as your headline number. |
| Pressure damage cost the NHS more than £3.8 million per day | NHS Improvement, Pressure ulcers: revised definition and measurement, 2018, based on 2015-16 data. | A modelled national cost of pressure ulcer treatment across NHS providers. | The underlying data is from 2015-16 and hasn’t been reliably restated since. It predates the pandemic and a decade of cost inflation. Flag the data year every time you use it, or somebody in the finance meeting will do it for you. |
| Pressure ulcer treatment cost between £1,214 and £14,108 per ulcer by category | Dealey C, Posnett J, Walker A. The cost of pressure ulcers in the United Kingdom. Journal of Wound Care, 2012;21(6):261-266. | Bottom-up cost modelling of treatment resource use by ulcer category, at 2011 prices. | At 2011 prices, so uplift it or state the price year. The wide range reflects category and complications, so quoting the top of it as typical is misleading. |
| Average discharge delay of 6.1 days, with around 324,000 bed days lost in the month | NHS England, acute patient flow and discharge delay statistics, January 2025. | Monthly national reporting of patients who no longer meet the criteria to reside and remain in hospital. | A single month, and a winter one at that. It measures delay, not deconditioning. The link between the two is inference, well supported but not measured in this dataset. |
| Deconditioning named as a well-evidenced risk of a prolonged hospital stay | NHS England, Model discharge pathway, publication reference PRN02543, 7 July 2026. | National operational guidance. Principle 2 states that staying in hospital longer than necessary causes harm, and names deconditioning. Asks that reviews from admission focus on preventing hospital-acquired deconditioning, including recording baseline functional abilities. | This is guidance rather than evidence. Cite it for what the NHS now expects of ward teams, not as proof of an effect size. |
| Individualised multicomponent exercise improved functional capacity in acutely hospitalised older adults | Martinez-Velilla N, Casas-Herrero A, Zambom-Ferraresi F, et al. JAMA Internal Medicine, 2019;179(1):28-36. | A randomised controlled trial of an in-hospital exercise intervention against usual care in very elderly acute medical inpatients, with Barthel Index and SPPB outcomes. | Single centre, in Spain, with a supervised intervention delivered by trained staff. It’s the strongest direct evidence that in-hospital activity changes function, and it should be described as a single-centre trial every time. |
| Recovery of pre-admission ADL function after discharge is not assured | Boyd CM, Landefeld CS, Counsell SR, et al. Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, 2008;56(12):2171-2179. | A prospective cohort following older adults for 12 months after an acute medical admission, tracking ADL recovery. | Observational, and a North American cohort. Useful for the argument that prevention beats rehabilitation, not for predicting what will happen to an individual patient. |
Just as useful as knowing what the evidence says is knowing where it stops.
We’re trying to close one part of that gap through quality improvement projects with NHS wards, where the ward keeps the data and the authorship, and we’ve committed to publishing null and negative results.
Please cite the primary sources wherever you can – they’re all listed above with enough detail to find them. If you do need to cite the collection itself, for a poster or an internal business case:
Vivid.Care. The evidence on deconditioning: key studies and statistics. Available at: https://www.vivid.care/deconditioning/evidence/ (accessed [date]). Last updated 3 August 2026.
We’ve published a longer evidence review on sitting out of bed, covering the mobilisation ladder, the barriers literature and the seating evidence in more depth, with 22 references and a full ward chair specification. You can download it here: Sitting Out of Bed: Evidence Review. The statistics on this page aren’t gated and won’t be, so if a number here is useful to you, please take it.
Around one in three patients aged over 70 is discharged with a new disability in an activity of daily living compared with their pre-admission baseline (Covinsky, JAMA 2011). The British Geriatrics Society has quoted figures of up to 65% for functional decline in older inpatients (BGS, 2017). The gap between those numbers reflects different populations and different definitions of decline, rather than any disagreement about direction. It’s usually safer to quote the range than either end on its own.