Free sit-out audit tool for your ward

Written by Tristan Hulbert, Vivid.Care. Author of “The Healthcare Professional’s Complete Guide to Specialist Seating Assessments”. Last updated: 3 August 2026.

Why bother?

Deconditioning is invisible in routine hospital data. Nothing on a standard ward dashboard tells you that a patient who walked in on Monday is being hoisted by Friday. A point-prevalence sit-out count takes about ten minutes and makes the problem visible to people who can resource it.

The benchmark is Brown and colleagues (JAGS 2009), who used accelerometry to measure what older medical inpatients actually did and found a median of 83% of measured time spent lying in bed, with a median of 43 minutes a day standing or walking. Most of those patients could walk. Your ward is probably closer to that than you’d expect, and finding out is the whole point.

How to run it

1. Pick a fixed time of day, ideally mid-morning or mid-afternoon rather than during a mealtime or a ward round.
2. Walk the ward and count. Enter the totals below.
3. For any patient who is in bed, record the reason. The reasons are more useful than the headline number.
4. Print or screenshot the summary, then repeat at the same time tomorrow.
5. After a week you’ve got a baseline you can take to a board round or a business case.

What the numbers mean

Limitations worth knowing about

• A point-prevalence count is a snapshot. It tells you nothing about the other twenty-three hours. It’s still a great deal more than most wards currently know.
• The time you pick matters enormously. Counting during a mealtime flatters you; counting during a ward round does the opposite. Pick a time and stick to it.
• Measuring changes behaviour. Sit-out rates tend to rise simply because somebody is counting. That’s a real and useful effect, but it isn’t the same as an improvement caused by something you changed.
• The 83% benchmark isn’t directly comparable. Brown and colleagues measured proportion of time using accelerometry, not proportion of patients at a moment. Use it for context and orders of magnitude, not as a target.
• Reason categories are approximate. “Patient declined” often hides discomfort, fear or fatigue, all of which can be addressed. Treat a high decline count as a prompt to ask why.

On privacy

There’s no analytics, no form submission, no cookies and no storage in this tool. Nothing you type is transmitted, and nothing is written to your device. Close the tab and it’s gone. We’ve deliberately not put an email gate on it, because that would make it useless for the thing it’s for.

You don’t need to enter any patient-identifiable information to use it, and you shouldn’t. Counts only.

What to do next

If your numbers surprise you, the practical steps are on how to prevent deconditioning in hospital, which includes three changes a ward can make this week at no cost. If a lot of your patients are in bed because of discomfort or because there’s no suitable chair, ward chair specification covers what to specify and the basis for each requirement.

If you want to turn the audit into a proper before-and-after study, our quality improvement programme supports NHS wards to do exactly that. The ward keeps the data and the authorship.

Related reading

• Deconditioning in hospital: the clinical guide
• Sitting out of bed, and how long patients should sit out for
• The evidence, including what it does not show