What Bed Size Does a Patient Need? The Relationship Between Body Mass Index and Space Required to Turn in Bed
What Bed Size Does a Patient Need? The Relationship Between Body Mass Index and Space Required to Turn in Bed Wiggermann, Neal; Smith, Kathryn; Kampar, Dee Over one-third of the U.S. population is now obese with a body mass index (BMI) greater than 30 kg/m2 (Ogden, Carroll, Fryar, & Flegal, 2015). As the general population has increased in body size, so too has the hospital population. From 2006 to 2015, the mean patient weight in acute care increased from 80.5 to 83.7 kg (177.5–184.5 lbs; Vangilder, Lachenbruch, Algrim-Boyle, & Meyer, 2017). Over the same period, the mean BMI increased from 29.0 to 29.7 kg/m2 (Vangilder et al., 2017), which is very near the definition of obese. A particular challenge for caregivers is that, although the mean body weight of the population is increasing, the heaviest patients are increasing at an even faster rate. For example, in 2006, 2.5% of patients weighed more than 136 kg (300 lbs), compared with 4.0% in 2015 (unpublished data from Van...