Richards 2005.

Study characteristics
Methods	Parallel randomised trial Study conducted between July 2002 and October 2003.
Participants	Setting: New Zealand Patients with community‐acquired pneumonia Age: T: 50.1, C: 49.8 Number recruited: hospital at home: 24; hospital: 25
Interventions	Hospital at home: admission avoidance from emergency room. Run by Pegasus Health, an independent practitioner's association for 230 GPs in Christchurch, New Zealand. Care provided by GP and community care nursing staff.
Outcomes	Median number of days to discharge, days of IV antibiotics, functional outcomes, mortality, readmission, patient satisfaction, costs
Notes	Follow‐up: 2 and 6 weeks Funding: not reported Conflicts of interest: none reported Ethical approval: local ethics committee Canterbury Ethics Committee, Christchurch, New Zealand
Risk of bias
Bias	Authors' judgement	Support for judgement
Random sequence generation (selection bias)	Low risk	Computer‐generated random numbers
Allocation concealment (selection bias)	Low risk	Telephone randomisation
Baseline outcome measurements (selection bias)	Low risk	Baseline outcome measurements done prior to intervention for functional outcomes; no relevant differences found
Baseline characteristics (selection bias)	Low risk	Baseline characteristics of the study and control groups are reported and are similar
Blinding of participants and personnel (performance bias) All outcomes	Unclear risk	Blinding of participants and personnel not possible
Blinding of outcome assessment (detection bias) Subjective outcomes	Unclear risk	Patient‐rated symptoms, satisfaction
Blinding of outcome assessment (detection bias) Objective outcomes	Unclear risk	Days on IV antibiotics, admissions extracted from clinical records
Incomplete outcome data (attrition bias) All outcomes	Unclear risk	6 exclusions after randomisation, no loss to follow‐up
Selective reporting (reporting bias)	Unclear risk	Insufficient information to allocate low or high risk