Some hospital patients have a tendency to roll out of a hospital bed. Falling from a surface of a normal height bed presents a significant risk of injury. To prevent a patient from falling off the surface of a bed, hospitals and care facilities have used various types of restraints to secure patients. However, patient restraints are no longer a viable option in many hospitals. One widely accepted solution to this problem has been to bring or locate the mattress platform of the bed as close to the surface floor as possible, yet still have the bed be able to raise the mattress platform back to normal bed height if not higher. The construction of an extremely low profile bed is limited by design due to the arrangement of the actuators to achieve angles of lift. When the frame of the bed folds up into itself to minimize the bed frame height in order to bring the patient support platform as close as possible to the floor, the actuators lose most of their vertical force component due to a shallow angle created by the actuators positioning themselves almost horizontally relative to the floor. In addition, often the caster wheels which are needed to move the bed with or without a patient in the bed are placed under the bed deck as well thus limiting the bed's ability to go as low as possible.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide an improved bed system that overcomes one or more of the aforementioned drawbacks or other limitations of the prior art.
Corresponding reference characters indicate corresponding parts throughout the several views. The exemplifications set out herein illustrate exemplary embodiments of the invention and such exemplifications are not to be construed as limiting the scope of the invention in any manner.