Paediatric Intensive Care Specialist Cots
Alder Hey’s Paediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU) looks after our most vulnerable children, those who are very ill and who need the highest level of medical care and monitoring.
The hospital continually seeks to improve the care of our patients and to provide the best facilities and equipment to facilitate recovery and safe treatment of the children in our care.
These new paediatric cots offer a one touch button enabling a quick and easy head up position for the child. The head up position is variable and offers a more comfortable and safe position whilst in intensive care. In patients with respiratory failure or distress, sitting up not only affects comfort but also increases residual capacity in the lungs by up to 30%. The European ICU guidelines suggest 30 degrees of head elevation is best and is easily achieved with this cot.
In addition to a head up position, this paediatric cot will also provide a knee bend that will help to maintain the patients’ position. This prevents shear and friction occurring if the child slips down the cot thus protecting the skin in these vulnerable patients. The electric actuator makes this an easy and safe operation to perform for the care giver, minimising the need for any manual handling of the child and still achieving a good position easily and safely and efficiently. In children who are very sick, the ‘hands off’ repositioning is beneficial to prevent stress.
In addition, electric variable height can benefit the carer to ensure they carry out nursing procedures with a straight back, and don’t need to be stooped over the cot at any time – thus reducing the risk of back injury.
These functions are achieved with an intuitive and easy to use control panel which is situation at the base of the cot, it allows head up, and height adjustment and bed extension by sue of easy to understand controls, with the addition of lock outs to add extra safety.
The unique side rail design allows complete visibility and observation of the child whilst they are nursed in the cot, the construction of a steel coated frame and injection moulded Plexiglas headboard, footboard and side rails offers a real visual management opportunity for busy paediatric intensive care units. These side rails move with the platform for additional safety and when lowered they lower with a semi-automatic devise to prevent crashing on the frame.
The design also allows easy and ‘hands off’ x-ray procedures in these sick children – with an easy to access X-ray cassette that can be easily centred – it ensures a safety for the patient and carer with no need to move or handle the patient to carry out this procedure.
With built in weigh scales this also allows accurate weight monitoring for drug dosage calculations.