Background
Working as a Med/Surg nurse, Amy Livengood, RN, recognized the need for a means to help her patients participate in their recovery through the empowerment of mobility. A basic tenant of health, patients were bound to their beds and rendered almost completely dependent on their care providers for the simplest of activities such as getting up to a chair. Working with her husband, Joe Livengood, MD, an Acute-Care Surgeon and Biomedical Engineer, they developed a solution that looked to the root of the cause for mobility; a lack of consolidation of equipment and a persistent trend of designing patients into the bed. Patients need their care environment to travel with them and truly have the patient define the location of the “patient-center.” The core platform of this solution is the Mobile Patient Care Environment (MPCE).As this Mobile Patient Care Environment took form, the application of it extended beyond ambulating patients on Med/Surg. ICU mobility became a reality as it allowed patients to mobilize with fewer staff and increase the number of activities that did not require the patient to be supine. Emergency Preparedness has benefited by transferring the MPCE to any locale resulting in a familiar environment for caregivers in alternate care sites. This increases the level of care available, reduces the variables nurses experience in a crisis situation and through a remarkable attention to design detail, maintains the same UL60601-1 and Joint Commission standards expected of the hospital environment, anywhere.