Home is often a safe place for our loved ones, as they are recovering from or managing all that comes with chronic illness. But for many families, the most essential piece of furniture is also often the hardest to wrangle. While a basic mattress in excellent condition can be comfortable to sleep on, it doesn’t offer much by way of support for medical issues.
Here’s what finally led us to swap a traditional bed for medical-grade support, and why it might be the right move for your family as well.
The Ergonomics of Caring for a Loved One at Home
For someone in a regular bed, it often entails hours of bending, reaching, and lifting at odd angles. Standard beds are situated low to the ground, causing pain and repetitive stress in the backs of caregivers who bend over to change bed linens or wash. So how does a medical-grade hospital bed address this issue with the Hi-Low distinctive feature: the entire bed rises to a waist-high ‘working level’ and lowers again for safe sleeping?
The Pillow Tower, when used as a placebo, fails to provide the desired results.
We often stack up pillows to prop the head or legs in a standard bed, attempting to compensate for soft material with bulky height. This “pillow tower” is notoriously unstable—it shifts during the night, causing incorrect spinal alignment and more pain. Hospital beds have electric articulation; the bed frame moves to meet the body. It offers a uniform, fixed lift and is designed to help improve circulation, as well as take the strain off of feet & legs.
HOW DO YOU HANDLE THE ONGOING RISK OF PRESSURE ULCERS?
Traditional mattresses are made for healthy, mobile sleepers who naturally adjust their weight throughout the night. For a patient confined to bed, the regular mattress can create “pressure spots” on the heels and on the tailbone in two hours or less. Clinical support surfaces, specifically alternating pressure mattresses, utilize air cells to continually redistribute weight. This is technology that is virtually impossible to duplicate off of a standard bed frame, but it’s almost a necessity in avoiding painful bedside sores.
The Safety Gap at Entry and Exit
Conventional beds are usually positioned at a level that is unsafely low for a person to rise or too high for them to lower their body to sit down. The issue is they don’t have any strong “grab points” for balancing. Height-adjustable beds can be adjusted to any desired inch between low and high positions for a safe transfer. Paired with sturdy assist rails, the bed ceases to be a fall risk and becomes an instrument of independence.
Compatibility with Life-Saving Accessories
A standard bed functions as an island. If the patient requires a trapeze bar to sit up, an overbed table for meals, or an IV pole for fluids, there is no place on which they can be safely fastened. These are medical-grade frames with built-in accessory ports. This enables the bed to be converted into a complete care station where all medical equipment can be stored neatly and securely (instead of balancing across a chest).
