Making Sense of Support Surfaces

We are a system of five hospitals, each with a variety of rental specialty beds without consistent reference material for the staff.  A system wide Wound Care group was challenged with the task of trialing and standardizing the specialty beds that would best meet the needs of our patient populations.

Once the specialty beds were chosen, the new focus of the project was to develop a universal algorithm for all the hospitals in the system. This algorithm had to be simple, direct and easy to follow since nurses in the system can rotate to any of the facilities.  We wanted to empower the staff nurse with the ability to choose the correct specialty bed to meet patient needs. This simplified algorithm needed to support all the specialty beds available to the all hospitals in our system.  Once the algorithm was developed, we disseminated the information to nursing staff through a variety of modalities.  We presented the information to the staff in their daily stand-up meetings and staff meetings and placed the algorithm on the hospital’s intranet resource page.

This project accomplished a multitude of needs that was identified by our group. Standardization of Specialty Rental Beds helped to contain costs for the hospital by limiting the number of bed companies that the hospital contracted with, empowered nursing to meet their patients’ needs and provided a standardized, simplified resource for the five hospitals in our system.