![]() ![]() If you have a loved one in a hospital or a nursing-home bed that has a bedrail, check for a gap between the mattress, the bed frame and the bedrail, Miles says. Even with the new guidelines, he says patients can't rely on hospitals and nursing homes to catch dangerous beds. ![]() "I think right now, it's patient and family beware," Miles says. He says the FDA did too little, too late to respond. Miles, a professor at the Center for Bioethics at the University of Minnesota, was one of the first to notice that people were dying after getting caught in bedrails. It's a rare event but it's worth worrying about."īut Steven Miles says the new FDA guidelines don't go far enough. It's just that because a million or more people are in a hospital bed every day in this country, it only takes a few of them that are frail and disoriented and a bed that's slightly dangerous to cause a problem. "We don't believe that it's an unsafe environment, on average. "We don't believe hospital beds are killer beds," he says. Kessler says that when the beds are put together correctly, there's almost never a problem. “A frail person may slip his or her head or arm into one of the gaps and may not be able to extricate it," he says, "and that's where injury or death occurs." If bed parts - such as the mattress, rails and frame - come from different companies, it can lead to dangerous gaps in the assembly, Kessler says. "Sometimes the problem is caused by people who put together hospital beds from disparate parts," says Kessler, who led the group of federal officials, industry representatives, consumer-group officials and others who came up with the new instructions. The FDA guidelines, issued in March, tell hospitals and nursing homes how to make complex calculations to check that beds are properly assembled. "They're very serious and we believe they're largely preventable." "People shouldn't die this way," says Kessler, who has reviewed the reports of these deaths. Others may not be reporting the incidents because they're afraid of legal liability or don't want the bad publicity that results when these deaths occur. Larry Kessler, director of the FDA’s Office of Science and Engineering Laboratories, says many nursing homes and hospitals don't know that they're expected to report such injuries. But federal officials say they believe these are just a fraction of the actual number of injuries and deaths. Thirty-five deaths were reported in the last year and a half. But sometimes patients - particularly frail, older ones with dementia or Alzheimer's - can get trapped between a bedrail and the bed mattress, which can lead to serious injury or even death.Ībout 350 bedrail-related deaths have been reported to the FDA since 1995. Patients use the rails to pull themselves up, and they can prevent patients from rolling out of bed. ![]() The Food and Drug Administration recently issued guidelines to try to end a little-known, but not uncommon, cause of death to people in nursing homes and hospitals: entrapment in the bedrails on hospital beds.īedrails are simple, metal devices that are supposed to be helpful. ![]()
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