Residential Designs of Hospital Beds

The decision to create a new hospital bed was primarily inspired by changing healthcare conditions and unmet demands in institutions. External technical improvements, such as microprocessors, touch displays, and new user interfaces, were considered throughout the makeover.

Redesigning a Hospital Bed

A redesign also allowed the chance to include internal developments such as frame designs that prevent patient mobility and enhanced technologies to lessen the danger of pressure injuries. Its users’ different demands and capacities present a particularly distinct difficulty when developing a hospital bed.

The new generation hospital beds were created for usage in medical-surgical (med-surgery), intensive care (ICU), and long-term acute care (LTAC) departments. Patients, nurses, nursing assistants, cleaning personnel, biomedical technicians, and physical therapists were the intended users of the new hospital beds. These groups differ substantially in terms of physical ability, mental condition, and schooling.

Furthermore, when using a hospital bed, a variety of activities such as eating and sleeping, cleaning, and disinfecting, repairing, positioning for therapy, positioning for patient comfort, weighing patients, transporting a patient throughout the hospital, or performing emergency procedures such as CPR or intubation are performed.

Safety Features for Different Hospital Beds

Clearances were required for third-generation hospital beds to be physically compatible with devices such as patient-handling equipment, overbed tables, and portable X-ray machines. Equipment, oxygen tanks, IV poles, sequential compression devices, optional mattress replacement systems, drainage bags, and patient restraints require attachment points. The hospital bed must fit in elevators, doors, and smaller rooms in older health care institutions, and it must also be designed to be kept in homes for bedridden patients.

Because of this variation, and because health care institutions sometimes do not give training for hospital beds, ease of use and straightforward design were vital. Numerous design limitations are explored and observed for contemporary hospital beds to be suitable with varying hospital environments across various health care institutions and to be utilized in homes.

Smart hospital beds must also interface with a range of nurse call systems and display and icon sets that match the intended accessories.

Fall Prevention Programs

The development team monitors a uniform patient fall prevention program across all patient safety activities connected to hospital beds. Patient falls are a source of worry for patient safety and hospital finances, with falls becoming an important indicator of hospital quality and the treatment of associated injuries not reimbursable under current CMS criteria.

These criteria control how hospitals get compensated for Medicaid and Medicare patients, who account for more than half of all patients in U.S. hospitals. Hospital beds have measures meant to decrease patient falls and fall-related injuries to address this issue. (Note: you can also use a hospital bed rental service in case you have short-term needs.

Feedback from the Users

Caregiver observation and comments have revealed that carers are averse to adopting any feature that involves more steps or time, even if such features lessen physical pressures on the body. As a result, a critical goal of the hospital bed development program is to provide assistive features that are easier and faster than prior designs.

Turn assist, a function that partially rotates the mattress to aid caregivers in turning patients, has been updated to activate in less than 30 seconds, down from more than 1 minute in previous iterations.

Residential and Institutional Needs

The statistics, according to Eurostat, estimate the economic resources committed to health functions, especially healthcare products and services consumed by resident units. The most prevalent sort of durable medical equipment is hospital beds.

Despite its name, hospital beds are utilized in settings other than acute care hospitals, such as rehabilitation centers, nursing homes, and private houses. Injuries involving hospital beds are not prevalent due to their widespread use. These injuries can occur while a patient is positioned in a fixed bed, transported in a bed, or moved into or out of bed. A ‘patient’ is a person getting treatment at a health care institution or a household, such as a private home or nursing home.