Ohio Responders Improvise to Transport Obese Patients

Emergency squads are making calls on more super obese people than ever, many weighing in excess of 800 pounds. And for the Dayton Fire Department, getting those severely overweight patients to the hospital has required extra crews and a little improvising.

"We have a device our sewing room made called 'The Big People Mover,' " said Lt. Doug Monnin. "It's basically a large tarp with handles."

Monnin may not be able to rattle off the statistics on obesity in America, but he can tell it's on the rise because of the number of times the Big People Mover has been called into action.

"It's becoming more prevalent," he said of those specialized trips. "The public usually doesn't encounter these people because they're bedridden."

Jim Shiverdecker, Dayton operations manager for Med Trans Inc., said his company has to transport one or two super morbidly obese patients per week. One woman who weighed 1,100 pounds was a Med Trans regular before passing away a few years ago.

"I've been in this field as a paramedic for 24 years, and in the last five or 10 years, patients are just getting bigger and bigger," he said.

Med Trans has oversized gurneys, which help, but those calls still require multiple crews to lift the patient into the floor of the ambulance.

"We make sure we have just enough (paramedics) so nobody gets hurt," Shiverdecker said.

EMT Inc., which is a private service like Med Trans, is one of the few in Ohio with hydraulic lifts on the back of its ambulances capable of hoisting as much as 1,500 pounds.

"I've seen people just put on boards and put in the back of ambulances (in the past)," said Kay Magee, EMT Inc. operations manager. "It was the only option we had. If you put them on cots, they were just very uncomfortable."

Capt. Nicholas Hosford of the Kettering Fire Department said his crews at times have had to knock out walls to get some supersized patients into ambulances. And the department makes sure its cots can bear the necessary weight by fortifying them with boards.

"Fire departments have the capability and ingenuity to accommodate larger-type patients," Hosford said. "Sometimes it has involved nontraditional modifications to accommodate them. But every time we've come across a patient that's 600, 700 or 800 pounds, we've never had a case where we haven't been able to transport them to the hospital."