It’s with great pleasure that we at the Hampshire Medical Fund have been able to furnish the #rehabilitation teams at Hampshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust with four SARA Combilizers, procured from Arjo. Two combilizers are now being used at Basingstoke Hospital and a further two are being used at Winchester Hospital, as a result of funds raised by the #DigDeep campaign.

Thanks to the Dig Deep Campaign and the purchase of a Sara Combilizer chair for Winchester ICU, it enabled us to take our first Covid19 ICU patient outside yesterday. They hadn’t felt or seen the outdoors for 33 days! A vital part of their #earlyrehab – Kim Dalzell, Band 7 Physiotherapist at the Royal Hampshire County Hospital Winchester

Click this link to hear from Colette Green, Physiotherapist, about the Sara Combilizer and how it will benefit patients in the Basingstoke & North Hampshire Hospital and Royal Hampshire County Hospital, Winchester. 

The video was taken prior to the outbreak of Covid19 when we didn’t even realise the additional help these special pieces of equipment would be.

More information:

The SARA Combilizer is a versatile piece of equipment that enables severely immobile patients to begin their rehabilitation earlier which can help speed up their recovery and potentially get them home from hospital quicker. It allows them to get out of bed and be supported in a sitting or standing position, even whilst they are on a ventilator. 

It allows the patient to be positioned into lying, sitting and standing positions – all of them achievable without having to perform transfers in between which shortens the time taken by multiple members of staff. It also reduces the chance of the patient fatiguing and lessens the physical load and stress on staff members.

It is a very comfortable chair that can be utilised by patients who are extremely weak or even in a state of awareness that are unable to sit, stand and transfer themselves, the chair lays flat and you can easily pat-slide them into it. The chair can then be used as a tilt table, by which we are able to get the patient into an upright position and start weight bearing through their feet. 

The therapy teams on both the critical care units at Winchester and Basingstoke have trialled this piece of equipment and found it to be very beneficial for the rehabilitation of complex patients.

This chair is quite different to a standard rehab chair as it has the double function of being able to be used as a tilt table as well. Early weight bearing in a safe manner using this chair will enable extremely weak patients (eg those suffering from Post Intensive Care Syndrome) to progress with their rehabilitation more quickly. 

Another advantage of this chair over a similar one on the market is that it is height adjustable when lying flat and in the chair position so it can adjust to the correct height for the staff members using it to guarantee safe manual handling. This also allows for good patient interaction when in tilt table function or chair which helps them psychologically.