You could start with asking your social worker about it.

How tall are you?

@flutherother 6 foot 5.5 inches.

@RedDeerGuy1 How tall are you? My son was 6 feet 6 inches tall and had no problem in hospitals or clinics or the military service for that matter.

The purpose of the gurney is simply to transport the patient safely from (presumably) a bed to an operating table and/or vice versa. It’s not a lounger, and it should not be a “storage” vehicle for patients to wait in a hallway until a bed or operating room opens up (or while a non-ambulatory emergency patient waits to be seen by a doctor). Moreover, if the hospital acquires a certain number of gurneys specially designed for taller people, they would either have to be segregated and saved for use only by taller patients, or they would be in general use and probably unavailable for taller patients anyway, when required.

So the crusade would have to be – for effectiveness – to modify the hospital’s whole fleet of gurneys to the desired size. (Alternatively, I suppose a well-heeled tall prospective patient with quite a bit of foresight could buy his own gurney and bring it to the hospital with him when he arrives for planned surgery. That’s a hard thing to prepare for in case of emergency use, which is why I left that scenario out of the discussion.)

In this case, then – the drive to replace the hospital’s entire fleet of gurneys, that is – you’d have to make the case with numbers. How much would the new gurneys cost, and would there be a price break for buying in bulk? (How many gurneys are we talking about, anyway? That’s a question for you, not one that I need an answer to.)

Then from that sum can be deducted the residual value of the currently-in-use gurneys and what they could realistically be sold for, presumably to other hospitals. That will give you a net amount of investment required by the hospital.

(One would also have to consider that gurneys, unlike most human bodies, are pretty inflexible. You could usually fold yourself into a less than optimally long ambulance treatment space, but a gurney could not. If the entire fleet of ambulances also has to be replaced, then it’s a near certainty that the project won’t come off any time soon.)

But getting back to the analysis, once you have a net amount of investment that the hospital would be required to make, then it’s time to add some salesmanship to the pitch: What is the “better outcome for patient services” that can be expected? What decrease in morbidity and mortality – “increase in quality delivery of services”, in other words – would the new gurneys add to the hospital’s bottom line? What decrease in expected malpractice suits? If that can be in some way demonstrated as a real / realistic number, and if it could therefore lead to a decrease in the hospital’s umbrella insurance and the doctors’ individual malpractice insurance premiums, then you could even enlist them to press for the change.

At least, that’s the framework of a method that might work, someday. (Unlikely, in this case, I think. Hospitals have bigger things to worry about than gurneys that “do the job”. But if you can prove otherwise, then good luck to you.)

@CWOTUS Maybe we can invent a low cost extender add on on for taller people?

@RedDeerGuy1 That’s what I was thinking. An adjustable gurney that would fit everyone. I would patent the idea get it manufactured under licence then sell it to hospitals nation wide before you ever need to use one.

Having worked in a several large hospitals let me assure you that if an extender was available the hospital would have lost them all 20 minutes after they were delivered.

And if the gurney was adjustable we would break the mechanism after the second use.

This is one of the reasons hospital equipment is expensive. It has to more bomb proof than stuff sold to the military. They at least look after their equipment or the drill sergeant shouts at them makes them do push ups (or at least that’s how it used to work. I’ve heard rumours that that’s been banned as being harassment). Seriously, some of the equipment we use comes with an unconditional guarantee. Think about that, if I take my £80k medical device out into the car park and drive a truck over it the company will repair it free of charge (although admittedly I’d then have several company reps permanently deployed in my department to train staff in the correct use of said equipment to make sure it didn’t happen again (basically adult supervision).

How does hospitals for obese patients get them?
Write your local or provincial MP… at least hospitals should have one or two on hand.