These results confirm previous observational reports that the presence of an endotracheal tube (ETT) remains a major obstacle to the provision of rehabilitation for critically ill patients. Despite rehabilitation being effective for improving muscle strength, the presence of muscle weakness did not influence the decision to provide rehabilitation. There were 1520 practitioner decisions representing 472 individual patient decisions. Practitioners classified patients suitable for out-of-bed rehabilitation on 149 occasions and not suitable on 323 occasions. A decision tree was constructed using binary recursive partitioning to determine the factor that best classified patients suitable for out-of-bed rehabilitation.

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