Patients rely on nurses for positioning and assistance with sitting and walking in the intensive care unit (ICU). Little information is available about how nurses evaluate patients’ readiness for progression from in-bed activity to out-of-bed mobilization. Understanding the barriers and facilitators to clinical practice may promote implementation of a protocol for progressive mobility when this activity is not common practice in a setting. Barriers and facilitators are defined as factors that prevent or enhance behavioral change.1 One barrier to adopting early, progressive mobility may be nurses’ perceptions of patients’ readiness for activity.2 –4 This report describes the results of staff interviews collected during an investigation into the feasibility of a protocol to implement early, progressive activity among surgical and medical ICU patients who received mechanical ventilation for more than 48 hours.

This descriptive study examined nurses’ perceptions of the barriers to and facilitators of use of progressive...

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