When you’re looking at hoists for brain injury units, it’s important to consider how easily they can be used and how comfortable they can keep the patient.
Brain injury units are high dependency environments that provide the best healthcare technology available to their patients. Patients always need to have the highest level of care and support to maintain a good quality of life.
Here are a couple of solutions we’ve come up with.
When designing brain injury units, you’ll find that they are a bit different from traditional hospital settings.
Brain injury units are high dependency environments and you’ll usually find that they’re set out in single rooms. This is to give patients the privacy they need to keep comfortable and focus on their rehabilitation.
You’ll also find that there are probably more specialist items to be included in those rooms. This is because it’s a high dependency environment, which means that there needs to be everything at the carer’s disposal to help the patient.
You may have to work this sort of equipment (like high dependency hoist systems) into your designs.
So bearing in mind that brain injury units need to provide the best care available, then you need to include the best hoists for brain injury units. For that reason, we highly recommend that you choose a X-Y hoist system.
The X-Y system will give you pretty much full room coverage thanks to the moving traverse rail. This means that patients can be moved to any location in the room with little hassle.
Lots of brain injury facilities will also include an en-suite for patients. Therefore, we’d suggest that you also have a X-Y hoist system in there and have them connected with a transit coupling (a hoist gate).
This will give patients full coverage of both the bedroom and the bathroom.
One key thing to bear in mind with brain injury patients is that they are sometimes easily agitated when they’re being moved around. Distress can be triggered by something as simple as a bumpy transfer.
To avoid upsetting patients, you’ll want to make the hoist system as automatic as possible to make it easier for carers to move patients around without having to manually switch between systems. This can be done with automatic Airglide360 transit couplings.
It’s also worth making sure that you use smooth running hoist track.
Our AirRise hoist units also use soft-start and soft-stop mechanisms to make the hoist lifts as smooth as possible. The units also have dual wheels on the hoist trolleys to make it particularly smooth when going around corners or transferring between tracks.
The hoist unit should also be equipped with a padded spreader bar. This will protect patients who may convulse and harm themselves.
But if you’re not too worried about room coverage and want to keep it looking and feeling as comfortable and homely as possible, then the Integralift hidden hoist is a good option.
Disguised as a bedhead unit or a cabinet, the Integralift hoist arm folds out and can facilitate transfers to and from the bed with ease. The arm then folds back away; you wouldn’t even know it was there!
What’s great about the Integralift is that is can be made to integrate other important medical components like gas tanks, nurse call systems, and power outlets. This makes it even easier for carers to provide the best care available when all the equipment they need is at their fingertips.
These are just a few things to think about when designing hoists for brain injury units. Whether it’s the layout, the components themselves, or the feel of the room, you can take care of all the little details to make sure that the environment is as good as can be for the most vulnerable patients.
If you need any further advice on high dependency hoist systems or track layouts, get in touch with our team!
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