Novato hospital beds get high-technology upgrade
Allows the staff to monitor patients more effectively
Patients recovering from surgery or emergency care at Novato Community Hospital will now rest in its most technologically advanced beds to date.
While the Sutter Health hospital typically replaces some beds every few years, it does not usually replace all of its beds at once, as it did this week.
The new beds can read a patient's heart and respiratory rate, alert medical staff more quickly when a patient is trying to get up and even tell patients to wait for a nurse in different languages.
Lisa Gammon, the hospital's interim chief administrative officer and chief nurse executive, said the decision to replace all 32 surgical unit beds and eight ICU beds provides more consistency of care to both the patients and staff.
“Technology really changes so rapidly that we found that we had, at one point, multiple different types of beds,” Gammon said, “which is not necessarily a problem but it's really hard for the nurses to learn multiple different modalities with the beds because everything is so specialized these days.”
Novato Community Hospital sees about 92,000 patients per year and specializes in joint replacement and hip replacement surgeries.
One of the main features of the Hill-Rom beds is a sensor in the mattress that reads a patient's heart and respiratory rates without the need for cables or cords. Medical staff are able to set alarms if either of these vital signs reaches certain levels, alerting them to potentially life-threatening conditions.
Catching these changes early is particularly important to prevent patients from developing sepsis, which is the leading cause of death in hospitals and occurs when the body has an extreme response to infection.
“The bed is the most used tool we use in the hospital, and almost every modality in the hospital comes in contact with that bed,” said Shari Marshall, the hospital's ICU and medical-surgical care manager. “So to have a bed that is actually doing some work for us is amazing.”
With the hospital seeing patients who speak nonEnglish languages, particularly Vietnamese and Spanish, the new beds also offer the advantage of being pro
grammed to speak different languages.
The hospital spent about $635,500 to replace the surgical unit beds and four of the ICU beds. The four other ICU beds had been
replaced earlier. About $215,300 of the cost was covered by philanthropic donations.
“When we have new equipment like this that is state-of-the-art, I think it really sends a message that we do value all the stakeholders here,” Marshall said. “This is such a win.”