A clinical observation.
A question we could test.

The project began with a physiotherapist’s observation in a small hospital: patients who got out of bed earlier often seemed to recover faster. The question mattered to everyday care, but the service had no systematically collected dataset large enough to investigate it and limited access to statistical expertise.

After discussing the observation, Zizi helped turn it into a testable question, identified a suitable public dataset, led the methods and analysis, and supported the manuscript through submission and revision.

Among patients receiving inpatient rehabilitation after hip or knee replacement, is first standing on postoperative day 2 or later associated with lower functional recovery per day than standing on day 0–1?

The study examined hip and knee replacement separately. Functional efficiency was defined as the change from rehabilitation admission to discharge divided by the length of the rehabilitation stay.

After knee replacement, delayed first standing was associated with lower functional recovery efficiency: −0.19 FIM points per rehabilitation day (95% CI −0.33 to −0.04) after adjustment.

The hip-replacement estimate was −0.17 points/day (95% CI −0.35 to 0.01). Hip and knee findings are reported separately; the association was clearer for knee replacement.

First verticalization can flag a recovery pathway that deserves closer review. The observational analysis tests an association; it does not establish that making a patient stand earlier causes faster recovery.

The clinician supplied a question grounded in practice. PhyZio contributed methods support, public-data analysis and research supervision to develop it into a manuscript.

The public cohort came from a high-volume orthopaedic hospital and was separate from the clinician’s own service. It provided an existing dataset in which to examine the question when a new local cohort was not practical.