Nurses have limited time for additional clinical activities but may miss potentially important opportunities for facilitating patient mobility during existing patient care. The proposed method is feasible and helpful in empirically investigating barriers to nurse-facilitated patient mobility in the intensive care unit (ICU). During three 4-hour observations of 2 nurses and 1 nursing technician, 194 distinct tasks were performed. A total of 4 categories of nurses’ work were identified: patient care (47% of observation time), provider communication (25%), documentation (18%), and down time (10%). An interprofessional team designed the observational process and evaluated the resulting data by using qualitative content analysis.

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