YOUR DONATIONS IN ACTION! Bed Weighing Scales for Orthopaedic Trauma Ward

Last December, we ran a story about a Health Care Assistant at Basingstoke and North Hampshire Hospital called Harry Cowdrey, who created a fundraiser for new state-of-the-art bed weighing scales to be used on patients residing in the orthopaedic trauma ward. Harry’s fundraiser saw him hike many miles across Hampshire, even taking on the massive task of walking from Portsmouth to Basingstoke. You can read the full story here.

Now that the equipment has been fully funded through Harry’s fundraising efforts, alongside donations to the Hampshire Medical Fund, the bed weighing scales have been purchased and installed in ward D4 of Basingstoke Hospital. We have since caught up with Harry and have spoken about the impact that the bed weighing scales have made on his department and the patients:

How will this new equipment be able to treat more patients, more effectively?

Well D4 is a orthopaedic trauma ward and we specialise in Neck of Femur/Femur fractures and so when a patient is transferred to us we have a bunch of care plans to follow to make sure our patient is treated holistically and to make them feel comfortable when they reach the ward. One such care plan is nutrition and weight and so with the condition our patients are in it’s impossible to get them weighed accurately without causing them a huge amount of pain, which is where the Bed Scales come in! They allow us to weigh the patient more effectively and without causing more pain to the patient.

For those who don’t know, what does your department do?

D4 is an orthopaedic trauma ward, so in layman’s terms that’s broken bones but we go one step further and we specialise in Neck of Femur and General Femur fractures. The Femur being both the largest bone in the body and the strongest bone as well, so it takes a lot of force to break. On D4 we have the honour of helping people fix these breaks mostly through surgery and assisting them to walk again.