Dorothy Twigg was living on her own, cooking and walking without help until a dizzy spell landed her in the emergency room. She spent three days confined to a hospital bed, allowed to get up only to use a bedside commode. Twigg, who was in her 80s, was livid about being stuck in a bed with side rails and a motion sensor alarm, said Melissa Rowley, her cousin and caretaker.
"They're not letting me get up out of bed," Twigg protested in phone calls, Rowley recalled.
In just a few days at the Ohio hospital, where she had no occupational or physical therapy, Twigg grew so weak that it took three months of rehab to regain the ability to walk and take care of herself, Rowley said. Twigg repeated the same pattern — three days in bed in a hospital, three months of rehab — at least five times in two years.
Falls remain the leading cause of fatal and nonfatal injuries for older Americans. Hospitals face financial penalties when they occur. Nurses and aides get blamed or reprimanded if a patient under their supervision hits the ground.
But hospitals have become so overzealous in fall prevention that they are producing an "epidemic of immobility," experts say. To ensure that patients will never fall, hospitalized patients who could benefit from activity are told not to get up on their own — their bedbound state reinforced by bed alarms and a lack of staff to help them move.
That's especially dangerous for older patients, often weak to begin with. After just a few days of bed rest, their muscles can deteriorate enough to bring severe long-term consequences.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/overzealous-in-preventing-falls-hospitals-are-producing-an-epidemic-of-immobility-in-elderly-patients/2019/10/11/d1894374-d8ab-11e9-a688-303693fb4b0b_story.html
