Seating, sitting out, and preventing deconditioning: The Hours Between Therapy Visits

Your contact time with a patient is a small slice of someone’s week. Everything else happens in the hours in between, and that is where deconditioning is either prevented or produced.

Older people in hospital spend around 83% of measured time lying in bed, with a median of 43 minutes a day standing or walking. But this is not a hospital problem. It is an inactivity problem, and it happens just as readily in a care home or in someone’s own armchair between your visits.

This webinar session, with guest speaker Fran Edmondson, covered those hours in between, and why a sound plan to get someone up so often fails before lunchtime.

Why watch back:

• Expert guest speaker: Fran Edmondson, Advanced Clinical Practitioner OT, has led therapy teams across acute medicine, critical care, stroke and neuro rehab, and now leads adult pathways in independent practice.
• Understand why people go back to bed: Discomfort is the most frequently cited barrier of all, which makes the chair a clinical variable rather than furniture.
• Get the current guidance in one place: Deconditioning is now named directly in NHS England’s Model discharge pathway and has its own British Geriatrics Society hub.
• Live demonstration: 🪑 See the seating features that decide whether someone sits for twenty minutes or two hours.

Topics covered and learning objectives:

✅ What deconditioning is, how fast it starts, and why it is driven by inactivity rather than age

✅ The harms and costs, for the person and for the system

✅ Why an inpatient stay accelerates the risk, and how much of that risk follows someone home

✅ How to prevent it, and why sitting out of bed is a distinct intervention that does not need to wait for walking

✅ How long someone should actually sit out for, and the guidance behind the answer

✅ The hidden harms of inappropriate seating, and how the wrong chair gets recorded as a patient problem

✅ Why sitting is not risk free, and how to bring chair time and bed time into one repositioning plan

✅ The falls paradox: how restricting someone to prevent a fall makes a fall more likely

✅ What a chair should provide, as a specification you can use to justify a recommendation

✅ A live chair demonstration and live Q&A

This webinar video is for you if you:

• Work with people who spend more of the day sitting or lying than anyone intends
• Have written “did not tolerate sitting out” and wondered whether the chair was the reason
• Need to justify better seating to a funder, panel or procurement team
• Support people at home between visits and want those hours to count