News

Des Peres firm's sled gets patients out fast in an emergency

By Chris Birk
SPECIAL TO THE POST-DISPATCH
08/06/2008

Clifford Adkins is changing the way hospitals across the country plan to evacuate patients in the face of disaster.

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina grimly underscored the need for health care and other institutions to have an effective means of evacuating immobile people, especially down flights of stairs. Recent earthquakes in the Midwest have served as reinforcement for many hospital and nursing home administrators.

Adkins' small Des Peres plastics firm continues to churn out a unique sled device that enables health care workers to easily move nonambulatory patients down stairwells. Called a Med Sled, the sleek plastic sled uses climbing instruments - tethers, carabiners and billets - to create enough leverage for a 100-pound nurse to evacuate a patient two to three times his or her size.

"It just kind of blew me away when the opportunity was there and the product made so much sense," said Adkins, 49, who co-founded ARC Products after taking early retirement from Anheuser-Busch. "The question .". is, 'How does somebody evacuate your Mom when she's at a nursing home?' There's almost a cry for need here."

Traditionally, the market for emergency evacuation devices has been a slim one, with products that rely on many hands and brute strength. Adkins designed the Med Sled to minimize the effort of - and possible harm to - health care providers and other personnel charged with caring for vulnerable people.

The patent-pending design features a tether woven around the sled's perimeter. Emergency workers tighten the tethers before transport, insulating the patient in what looks like a cigar tube. The sled then basically glides down one flight of stairs at a time.

A 15-story hospital might only need 15 pairs of hands to use the sled. Some devices, like medical chairs, can require the strength of as many as four or five people to evacuate a single patient.

The sled - which sells for about $270 - weighs just 9 pounds and rolls into a tight coil about the size of a collapsible lawn chair for storage.

Some of the sled's components are made by Seiler Plastics in Green Park, and it is assembled by Earth City-based Logistek.

The sled has become the tool of choice for six of the nation's top hospitals and many in the St. Louis area, Adkins said.

The East-West Gateway Council of Governments has distributed 240 sleds to 45 hospitals in the St. Louis metro area since December 2006, according to Nick Gragnani, executive director of the St. Louis Area Regional Response System.

Among them is Barnes-Jewish Hospital, which has purchased more than 130 Med Sleds. Most are used for the hospital's intensive care units, said Jerry Glotzer, director of regulatory compliance and environmental health and safety.

The main Barnes facility in the Central West End has 17 floors. One of those ICU units is on the 10th floor. At any given time, nonambulatory patients might occupy about 200, or 20 percent, of the hospital's beds, Glozter estimated.

The hospital tested four sleds over the last two years in a series of disaster drills. Workers were impressed with the device's simplicity, said Glotzer, noting that the average evacuation time was about a minute per floor.

Tests also indicated that workers with no training were just as apt to correctly operate the system than those with prior experience.

"The big struggle and the big challenge for hospitals is to figure out a way to safely move patients down stairways," Glotzer said. "I think the staff is happy to know that we're rolling this technology out and that we have some sort of solution."

The solution has also proved profitable for Adkins, who pumped $500,000 of his own money into the company. He expects sales to top $2 million this year.

Adkins got the idea for the sled after meeting a group of U.S. Marines at a plastics convention in Las Vegas. They asked him to develop a specially designed rescue sled for extricating wounded soldiers from urban battlegrounds.

ARC Products still sells the rescue sleds for military use, but the specially equipped Med Sled has become its signature innovation. Adkins has since augmented the hospital evacuation device for pediatric and obese patients.

"If you're in a five-, six-, 10-story building, that's 20 flights of stairs. People just can't do it," he said. "This is a whole new way of evacuating people."

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