Did you know that 64% of Americans are overweight or obese? Sixty-four percent—that’s more than half of the country’s entire population. Knowing that, it should come as no surprise that hospitals and doctor’s offices are being forced to change the way they operate. If they didn’t, obese patients would simply not get proper health care.
I will admit I really hadn’t given the subject much thought, until my firefighter/EMT brother told me about a new bariatric ambulance he has been training on. The ambulance is equipped with a wider stretcher and an additional seatbelt. In addition, it also has a remote to help patients get into the ambulance safely.
But the revisions haven’t stopped there. That’s because those same patients who have to use the services of the bariatric ambulance are also the ones who are too big to fit inside a traditional CT scanner or into traditional hospital beds. Think about how that makes them feel. Can you imagine being sick and dreading to go to the doctor because you are 300 pounds and embarrassed that you won’t be able to fit in the chairs at the doctor’s office, or that the blood pressure cuff won’t fit around your arm?
To change that many hospitals are designing bariatric rooms with beds that are nearly double the size of an average hospital bed. The new rooms also offer larger showers with shower chairs, bigger toilets, and chairs that can hold up to 600 pounds. Doctors say it is a way to help obese patients receive “dignified care.”
Hospital equipment is also being redesigned to accommodate overweight patients. For example, GE Medical recently designed a larger CT scanner that fits almost all obese patients. It’s the first of its kind in the world. Doctors (and my brother) will tell you until now many patients couldn’t get X-rays because they couldn’t fit in the scanner. So doctors had to guess what’s wrong with them. The scanner runs about $1.5 million. But, in most cases the cost of the extra equipment isn’t be passed along to individual patients. It comes out of the hospital’s yearly budget, so the cost is passed on to all patients.