The Benefits of Hospital Sitter Services
Hospitalization can cause patients to experience anxiety, fear, create potential environmental/situational hazards and lead to increased confusion. Other times, patients need constant physical assistance, such as for transfers, ensuring a continued safe environment, and minimizing fall risk. Hospital sitter services provide a solution, benefiting both patients and the hospital staff that care for them.
What Are Hospitals Sitter Services?
Hospital sitters can alleviate the anxieties of both patients and their loved ones by offering personalized care around the clock. Hospital sitters allow patients’ loved ones the confidence that a caring professional is always at the patient’s side, even when clinical staff are not with the patient. These experienced caregivers can de-escalate and reduce the physical stress that patients can experience while minimizing potential falls or other injuries.
Hospital sitter services are especially helpful for at-risk patients. Hospital sitters play an active role in patient safety, keeping a watchful eye and maintaining a stable and safe environment. Hospital sitters that receive certified training and understand de-escalation protocols offer a disciplined service solution that can make a hospital stay safer and more comfortable.
How Can a Hospital Sitter Help?
The benefits of hospital sitter services are far-reaching. Hospital sitters offer non-clinical services that boost a patient’s recovery, serving as extra eyes, ears, and hands that give family members and patients greater peace of mind.
The personalized care hospital sitters provide can include:
- Observing a patient throughout a hospital stay
- Updating concerned parties, such as medical staff and family members, about the patient’s progress.
- Providing a welcome healing environment by engaging patients with conversations, songs, and other activities
- Observing patient status changes and ability to identify signs of distress
- Provide a continued safe environment for our higher-risk, behavioral, or self-harm patients
Because hospital sitters spend the most time with patients, they are in a unique position to inform clinical staff about any changes to a patient’s condition. Hospital sitters provide customized services that go beyond the care that patients receive from clinical staff during a hospital stay, positively impacting the patient experience.
Who Needs a Hospital Sitter?
Though the exact services provided can vary depending on the complexity of a patient’s medical needs, hospital sitter services are suitable for all kinds of patients. Hospital sitters can work with everyone, from patients who only need occasional check-ins to patients who require constant observation. The more complicated a patient’s needs are, the greater the benefits hospital sitter services provide.
Some examples of patients that benefit from hospital sitter services include:
- Children
- Mental health patients
- New mothers
- Patients recovering from surgery
- Seniors
How Do Hospital Sitter Services Help Hospitals?
The benefits of these services go beyond helping patients. Professional caregivers like hospital sitters free up clinical staff, allowing them to practice at top-of-license. As clinical staff struggles to meet all the patient needs while balancing more on their plate, demand for hospital sitter services is rising. At the same time, hospitals cannot always predict the needs for these services. All too often, clinical staff are pulled away from patients, creating a strain on staffing ratios and planning. Hospital sitters can help alleviate that strain while still providing the personalized care patients expect and deserve.
Hospital sitter services can fill a gap in care, creating a safer and more engaging experience for patients, while freeing clinical staff. These professional caregivers can help foster the comfortable and safe environment that patients need to recover.
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