'Can practice undertaken by patients be increased simply through implementing agreed national guidelines?' An observational study

Objective: To increase autonomous practice time of patients on the stroke unit of a nursing home. Intervention: Nurses stimulated and coached patients with the help of four interventions (muscle strengthening, sitting balance and reach, getting up from a chair, walking) from the evidence-based Clinical Nursing Rehabilitation Stroke Guidelines. Design: An observational study. Practice time of elderly stroke patients in this study was compared with the time observed in our previous study in the same setting. Setting: Rehabilitation units of a nursing home in the Netherlands. Subjects: Seventeen frail stroke patients, including 8 men, 9 women, with a mean age of 75.8 (SD +/- 9) and 17 subjects with the same characteristics who participated in a previous observational study. Main measures: Time spent on therapeutic activities was measured using the Behavioral Mapping method. Results: The time spent on therapeutic activities increased significantly from 103.5 minutes measured in our previous study to 156.5 minutes in this study (Z = 2.86; P