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| Press Release |
Announcement of Project Progress
Math, Science and Technology Application
Contact:
Caitlyn FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Period 7/8 March 19, 2008
Systems Engineering II: Hospital Bedrail Device
March 19, 2008- Caitlyn is currently a senior at The Marine Academy of Science and Technology on Sandy Hook, NJ. She is planning on majoring in nursing at Wagner College. For this reason, she designed a senior Systems Engineering II project that was related to the field of nursing.
Introduction
Since halfway through her junior year, Caitlyn has been working on brainstorming, researching, designing, and constructing her project, which is to design and construct a working cover to a bed rail that would eliminate the risk of entrapment in all 7 zones in hospital beds.
Background Information
Entrapment is defined as an event in which a patient is caught, trapped or entangled in the spaces in or about the bed rail, mattress, or hospital bed frame. Entrapment can lead to serious injury or death. Between January 1, 1985 and January 1, 2006, the FDA received 691 incidents in which patients were caught, trapped, tangled, or strangled in hospital beds. Of those reported incidents, 413 were deaths, 120 nonfatal injuries, and 158 cases where staff needed to intervene to prevent patient injuries. Although that may not seem like a high number of cases of entrapment, it still is an issue in the medical community.
The FDA first alerted the hospital and nursing home community to this problem in 1995. Since then the Hospital Bed Safety Work Group comprised of representatives from the FDA, hospital bed manufacturers, healthcare organizations such as the American Nurses Association and the American Healthcare Association, consumer groups such as the AARP, and other government agencies have worked together to investigate the problem, identify its causes, and find solutions. They discovered that the key body parts at risk of entrapment are the head, neck, and chest. They also found that 7 major zones of entrapment exist in a hospital bed, as shown in Figure 1, which include:
Within the rail
Under the rail
Between the rail and the mattress
Between rails, at the end of the rail
Between split bed rails
Between the end of the rail and the side edge of the head or foot board
Between the head and footboard and the mattress |
posted by ck @ 1:21 PM  |
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