From Demanding Repositioning to Intelligent Care: How Turn All Creates Value for Residents, Care Staff and the Municipality

By: Birgit Andersen, Wound Care Nurse, Køge Municipality

For the past eight years, Køge Municipality has been working with automatic lateral tilting systems in care. Experience shows that the technology can free up staff resources, reduce the number of physically demanding repositioning procedures and support both the prevention and treatment of pressure ulcers.

Over the past five years, we have supplemented these solutions with the automatic lateral tilting system Turn All. The solution thus helps free up staff resources, reduce physically demanding tasks and strengthen efforts in pressure ulcer prevention and wound healing.

We use Turn All, among other things, as a valuable aid in the prevention of pressure ulcers. The system is primarily used for residents who can participate in transfers but are too weak to change position independently.

Turn All is particularly relevant in situations where both residents and their relatives find nighttime repositioning disruptive. The system can reduce the need to interrupt sleep for manual repositioning several times during the night.

Furthermore, we have had positive experiences using the system with terminally ill residents, where the aid is often included as part of palliative care during typically short care periods. The aim is to increase comfort while reducing the physical strain on both residents and staff.

We take advantage of the fact that TURN-ALL is quick and easy to install. It is conveniently supplied in a bag and can be placed underneath the existing mattress in the care bed by the staff present in the resident’s home. The pump features a QR code linking to a short instructional video showing how to install and use the system. The system is easy to understand and operate for residents, staff and relatives alike. This allows us to quickly initiate automatic pressure-relieving repositioning.

If a more advanced automatic lateral tilting system is required, for example when a resident needs more individually adapted repositioning programmes or assistance from the tilting technology for turning, we switch to that system.

It is clear that whenever a manual repositioning procedure can be avoided, time is freed up for staff to carry out other tasks. This is particularly relevant at a time of labour shortages and a growing elderly population. At the same time, the physical strain on staff is reduced as the need for manual transfers and repositioning decreases.

In Køge Municipality, we initially made a conservative estimate of how quickly an investment in TURN-ALL could pay for itself. Based solely on avoiding one nighttime visit for repositioning, which would otherwise have required two night-shift staff members, the investment would be recouped after approximately 10 weeks.

In practice, the investment is probably recouped even sooner. For the prevention of pressure ulcers, it is recommended that residents are repositioned at least every three hours around the clock. With TURN-ALL, automatic position changes are performed every 30 minutes, providing significantly better pressure relief. This reduces the risk of developing pressure ulcers, which can be distressing for residents and associated with substantial treatment costs.

Awareness and use of automatic lateral tilting systems, including TURN-ALL, have steadily increased in Køge Municipality. Today, only very few residents at moderate to high risk of developing pressure ulcers are not using one of these solutions.