To prevent a patient or a small child from unconsciously turning sideward and falling from a bed, guardrails have been designed and added to two lateral sides of the bed. In designing a bed guardrail, not only for a sickbed in a hospital or a stretcher on an ambulance, but also for a bed used in home, it is a must to ensure the guardrail is safe for a user. The guardrail for bed must satisfy a required safety coefficient, lest it should cause second injury or even death to a patient or child using the bed. That is, the guardrail for bed, particularly sickbed and stretcher, must be designed in consideration of the user's comfortableness, safety, and convenient operation.
However, the guardrail tends to form a hindrance to doctors and nurses in the process of emergent medical care and setting life support, or to the patient's family members in helping the patient in turning sideward, cleaning body, etc. Therefore, it has become an important issue to design a mechanism for smoothly and safely lifting or lowering the guardrail relative to a bed frame. For a guardrail to have sufficient space for smooth operation thereof, a quite large gap would frequently exist between the lifted guardrail and the bed frame. Such large gap tends to dangerously pinch the patient's or the small child's hand or neck, and needs improvement.
It is therefore tried by the inventor to develop a pinch-preventing unit for bed guardrail to effectively eliminate the drawbacks in the bed guardrail of prior art.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds