WINNEMUCCA - Humboldt General Hospital has purchased a bariatric stretcher for $15,963. The new stretcher increases the weight capacity for larger patients to be moved from place to place within the hospital.
The new, wider and stronger stretcher will go into the emergency room, and will be available to move patients up to 700 pounds within the emergency room and will make it possible to transport those patients to the floor of the operating room.
The purchase of the bariatric stretcher is the latest of several steps that have been taken to continue to be able to address the medical needs of patients whose weight exceeds the capacity of equipment that had previously been available.
Humboldt General Hospital has a "large bore" MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imager) that can be used with larger patients; its capacity is 500 pounds. All patients, especially anyone with any claustrophobia issues, may enjoy the wider machine as well, since it doesn't surround the body so closely.
Humboldt General Hospital's operating room has a wider, 700- pound capacity surgical table, and Emergency Medical Services has its own large-capacity stretcher available to transport patients to the hospital when they have medical emergencies out in the community or on the highway.
Ambulance personnel don't lift the larger capacity stretchers into the ambulances; in fact, ambulance personnel don't lift any stretchers into the ambulance.
EMS Director Pat Songer said that due to prevalence of back injuries in EMS personnel, many emergency medical services departments (including Humboldt General Hospital's EMS) have converted to a winch system. The stretchers are rolled to the back of the ambulance and then hooked to the winch system which pulls the stretcher into the back of the ambulance where it is secured.
Songer said EMS also has a special ambulance for larger patients with a capacity of up to 1,200 pounds. When an ambulance call comes for a patient in the bariatric weight range, supervisors are sent along in another ambulance to assist, he said.
Emergency medical calls for patients over 400 pounds are not common; Songer estimated HGH EMS receives about one call a month. Responses to patients in the 1,000-pound range do happen, Songer said, but there have only been a few.
Such calls may become more common. CDC studies have put adult obesity rates in the U.S. at 35.7 percent and rising. For once, Nevada is not at the top of the list of states showing high rates for poor health practices. Nevada's statistics show 28.4 percent of adults in the weight range considered obese.
According to a February article in Readers' Digest, larger capacity ambulances were introduced in 2001, and CT scanners can now be ordered with 25 percent larger diameters.
As the number of people with obesity increases in the U.S., so will their related health issues.
Songer noted that the increased weight makes it harder to breathe, harder to get around, the weight impairs circulation and is harder on the heart.
Those problems are added to the increasing number of cases of weight-related diabetes and all the complications that go with that disease.
"Until we get health under control in the U.S., it'll be an increasing problem," Songer concluded.
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