Bedside Medication Cabinets
Over the past few months, nearly 200 bedside cabinets with a locked top drawer have been introduced to units in the Tower and Connors Center to enable patients’ medications to be secured at the bedside and for the hospital to meet Joint Commission standards. The drawer is to be used primarily to store medications that patients bring in from home for self administration as approved by the BWH Pharmacy. For patients who are on precautions due to an infection, multi-dose items such as eye drops, inhalers, liquids, topical creams and ointments can be stored securely in this locked bedside table drawer. Medications that require refrigeration and controlled substances are not to be placed in this storage area. With the deployment of these cabinets, the hospital count for lockable bedside cabinets is more than 500. This last rollout of 200 cabinets concluded the deployment on all units where bedside medication storage has been identified as a need. In the Shapiro Center, the existing pass through box built into each patient room serves this same purpose.
Preventive Maintenance Project
Each night since February, Central Transport staff have been wheeling 10 to 15 beds back to a repair shop in the Tower as part of the Bed Preventive Maintenance Project. Each bed is thoroughly checked by a group of on site manufacturer technicians and mechanics. More than 800 Stryker step-down and ICU beds have already been serviced. All the bed alarms, bed scales and bed mechanisms, among other features, have been repaired. In addition, all bed IV poles were fixed and now have the yellow pole control mechanism. The maintenance project has significantly reduced the number of complaints about broken beds and helps to increase the life span of the beds. Please report any problems promptly so beds can be kept in good working condition going forward.
Watch “Boston Med” this Summer
BWH, along with MGH and Children’s Hospital, is featured in a new eight-part primetime medical documentary series on ABC called “Boston Med,” airing Thursday’s at 10 p.m. this summer. You may remember that the camera crew was here for four months in 2009, during which time ABC captured more than 2,500 hours of unscripted footage through unprecedented access to the life inside these nationally-renowned institutions. Check BWHPikeNotes.org all summer for interviews with featured staff and other news related to “Boston Med.”