pushing hospital beds around

[kraam]

oh my god! how do you nurses do it? i volunteered today, and a nurse asked me to move a patient to a room, and i kept bumping the poor guy into walls. its a lot harder than it looks! how do i carefully steer the bed into the right direction? do i stand on the side, or behind the patient or near their feet?

please, help. i dont want to bump another patient into the wall

[aileenve, ASN, RN]

This is the #1 reason I have almost left nursing! It seems no one except an RN can move a bed where I work.

[cherrybreeze, ADN, RN]

If a bed has a person in it, I will not move it by myself. When we need to deliver an unoccupied bed to surgery, that's a little different and I'll go it alone, but I'll take my time and go very slowly, and even then it can be difficult.

Even with TWO people it can be difficult to move an occupied bed, even with a steer function. I also employ the joke tactic , it puts patients at ease the vast majority of the time. Our doorways BARELY fit beds through (elevators too!), so the line about adding an inch to each side of the doorway makes them smile. "Hands and arms inside the carpet" (Aladdin, anyone?) is good for a laugh, too , as well as your old woman-driver stand-bys. I tore some cartilage in my shoulder several years back not by moving a bed, but as a result of someone not locking a bed after bringing a patient back, so never forget that part at the end! Bottom line is, take your time, and insist on a second set of hands (or more, if it's a bariatric patient and/or bed). It's just too easy to get hurt (or hurt the patient; lines can get pulled/tangled very easily trying to get on elevators and such).

We have a security guy who "helped" us bring a bariatric patient back from CT in a big boy bed, and holy cow, did this guy ever make the situation WORSE. He was going as fast as possible, and the bed wasn't down as far as it could go (I didn't realize it; I wasn't familiar with the bed and it had a huge overhead contraption) so we went full-speed to dead stop when we hit something in a doorway; I had a lovely, big purple bruise on my knee cap for a week to show for it (walked right in to the back of the headboard). Then, getting on the elevator, which we barely cleared, the side of the mattress had a thing off the side of it that inflated and deflated different sections of it (contraption couldn't be moved, either, not the best design). Instead of waiting for us to SEE what was getting caught, he just pulled harder on the bed until it went in...um HELLO, dumb*ss! That could have been a foley bag, or worse! You don't just pull until it makes it! Ack! Some people just want to be cowboys. Sorry, got a little O/T, but that experience stuck out to me as one of the worst "bed-moving" situations of my recent past.

[kraam]

i finally mastered the skill! i'm a bed pushing pro, and i took your advice. i used the steer function to push, and when i put them into their rooms, i used neutral. it really helps. thank you all :)