http://www.grahammedical.com/PORT ORANGE, Fla. — It took three crews, two stretchers and a piece of plywood to remove a gasping victim from his house. And it wasn’t even on fire. The paramedics were facing a different problem.
Their patient, who was having difficulty breathing, weighed nearly 500 pounds. Rescuers needed two stretchers, side by side, but couldn’t move him through the door that way. “We had to improvise by using plywood as a backboard,” recalled Russ Rafferty, division chief of the Port Orange Department of Fire & Rescue. “We took out a window and slid him out of the window, where two stretchers — not one, but two stretchers — were waiting for him below.” It took three hours and 11 paramedics to get the patient to the hospital that day. Stories like these, emergency officials say, used to be rare. Now they are becoming more frequent.
To cope, Central Florida hospitals and paramedics have bought bigger beds, wider wheelchairs and stronger stretchers to help the area’s largest residents. Port Orange paramedics recently equipped seven trucks with the MegaMover 1500, one of the strongest stretchers on the market. The stretcher is wider than a typical gurney and can handle more weight -- up to 1,500 pounds. “When you go into a call, your adrenaline is already high. Your patient is 300 pounds, and your stress level is through the roof,” said Carol Calache, a Port Orange paramedic. “So anything you can use to ease that, the better. The more time that you can focus on your patient, the better.” Before the MegaMover, Port Orange paramedics had to take extraordinary measures, often to the patient’s embarrassment. The department’s stretchers and gurneys had a fraction of the weight capacity of the MegaMover and weren’t very good in certain situations, such as moving large patients down a flight of stairs. “Sometimes you’ve gotta get inventive,” Calache said.
Rescuers also have gotten hurt. “We’ve got a guy who pulled his shoulder just moving them [patients] from the bed to the floor,” Rafferty said. The makers of the MegaMover 1500 say that the product — and its name — were not created for the obese. Rather, they work better in tight spaces. Still, the MegaMover’s ability to transport obese patients is the main reason Port Orange paramedics bought it, said spokeswoman Tonya Gilardi. The department’s 40-inch-wide, 80-inch-long stretchers are made of polypropylene with six reinforced, nylon straps on each side. The cloth-like stretcher costs $20.
Large-capacity emergency equipment isn’t new. Volusia County’s ambulance service — EVAC — has had similar stretchers for 15 years and keeps them on hand when an obese patient needs transporting, said EVAC spokesman Mark O’Keefe. As Americans are getting larger, investing in such devices is becoming more widespread,said Jerry Johnston, president of the National Association of Emergency Medical Technicians. In Iowa, where Johnston is an EMS director, rescue crews have gotten around heavy lifting — and expensive worker compensation claims — by investing in hydraulic stretchers than can handle up to 500 pounds. “It has to do with the super-sizing of America,” Johnston said. “Not only are these patients very, very big, but they’re very, very sick.”
A report by the Trust for America’s Health last year found that about one out of five adults in Florida is obese. The nationwide proportion is one in three. Johnston has been in the business for 30 years but hasn’t seen obesity affect how rescue crews work until recently. “We had a patient that weighed almost 600 pounds. He was so big that he couldn’t breathe lying down. “We couldn’t get him on a stretcher and he was too big to fit into a helicopter,” Johnston said. Rescuers finally used an oversized wheelchair and got him into an ambulancefrom a loading dock. “It took us four to five hours to figure out how to move him.” “It used to be very rare that we had a very obese patient,” said Capt. Stephen Minguy of Orange County Fire Rescue. “Nowadays, it’s not so rare.”
The Orange County rescue crews keep heavy-duty stretchers and tarps on their rescue units to handle wider patients. “We adjust to meet the needs. I suppose we’ll keep adjusting as folks keep getting larger,” Minguy said, “and hopefully, they won’t keep getting larger.”