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Review
Sitters as a patient safety strategy to reduce hospital falls: a systematic review.
February 26, 2020
Greeley AM, Tanner EP, Mak S, et al. Ann Intern Med. 2020;172(5):317-324.
This systematic review identified 20 articles assessing the effectiveness of bedside “sitters,”used for agitated patients who appear to be at high fall risk.. In general, the researchers found very-low-certainty evidence that sitters reduce fall risk in acute care hospitals and only moderate-certainty that alternatives (e.g., video monitoring) can reduce sitter use without increasing fall risk, suggesting that sitters are not as useful as initially believed. All included studies had a least one methodological limitation (such as not defining what consisted a fall, lack of outcome assessor blinding).
