One million inpatient falls occur annually in U.S. acute care hospitals. Sitters, also referred to as Continuous Patient Aids (CPA's) or safety attendants, are frequently used to prevent falls in high-risk patients. While it may make intuitive sense to use sitters to prevent falls, it does beg the question, what's the evidence that they work? We discussed with Drs. Adela Greeley and Paul Shekelle from the West Los Angeles Veterans Affairs Medical Center their recent systematic review published in Annals of Internal Medicine. Their review identified 20 studies looking at this issue (none of which are randomized trials). To sum up their findings, there were only two studies comparing sitters to usual care and they came up with conflicting conclusions (in one, the fall rate was lowered; in the other, it was not). In the other 18 studies, alternatives to sitter use were evaluated. The only thing that seems to have some evidence for was video monitoring (fall rates either stayed the same...