Tilt chair helps Baptist Health Paducah patients take faster steps toward recovery

For more than a decade, physical therapist Miranda Scott had a tilt chair at the top of her wish list to improve patient care at Baptist Health Paducah. 

“I’ve been wanting this chair for 13 years, and I’ve been here for 14,” Miranda said. “As a therapist, I’ve always known about it. I hunted for years, and the one we have now is the one I finally settled on because the ones we’ve rented have all been manual. It’s all electric, so if the patient has any movement in their hands, they can tilt themselves. I tried to get something less labor-intensive for both staff and patients. We were very blessed to have the means to get the one we have.” 

The chair – funded by Baptist Health Foundation donors – is changing recovery for patients who are battling the effects of stroke, spinal cord injury or other neurologic conditions. 

“When people come into our hospital, the one thing they don’t want to do is move,” neurologist Joseph C. Ashburn, MD, explained. “Whether it be a stroke or a spinal cord injury or a number of neurologic things, the obvious thing they want to try to do is lay in bed the whole time.” 

But staying in bed slows progress. 

“The ratio I like to tell people is it takes three days to recover for every one day in the hospital,” Dr. Ashburn said. “So, if somebody spends one week here, that’s three weeks of recovery at a minimum. And the more they’re lying flat on their back and not moving, the longer that recovery time becomes.” 

That’s where the tilt chair makes a difference. By gradually shifting weight and posture from lying down to upright positions, it allows patients to regain strength safely. 

“It helps patients mentally but also allows us to speed up their therapy,” Miranda said. “We can use it to prove that patients can be out of bed, upright for longer periods of time. That helps justify that they can go to higher levels of care after here, like inpatient rehab for spinal cord injuries and strokes. We couldn’t do that before because we couldn’t get them out of bed; we didn’t have anywhere safe to put them.” 

Dr. Ashburn agrees. 

“It makes it where we can take somebody who really would be bedbound, and we can put them in this device and safely move their weight around,” he explained. “It not only creates different pressures on the body, but it also gives them a little bit more upright posture, and that’s how our human bodies are designed. Our blood pressure, our heart rate – all those things are changed by the posture of the human body.” 

Miranda says the tilt chair was something the whole rehab staff has always wanted, and while they’ve rented other ‘neuro chairs,’ those pieces of equipment were always manual, which requires someone else in the room, and often hard to get quickly.  

When it came to securing a team to push for in-house resources, she says Dr. Ashburn was one of the biggest supporters of her efforts to get the tilt chair to Baptist Health Paducah, permanently. 

“Once you get doctors behind you, I mean, that's a good push,” she said. “Once we had him behind us, along with the stroke program, that was our biggest driving force, I feel like.” 

Now, the tilt chair is a cornerstone of therapy at Baptist Health Paducah, and patients feel the results. Thanks to generous donors, they have access to life-changing technology to help them take the first steps, literally and figuratively, toward recovery. 

“They love being out of bed whenever they can be,” Miranda said. “We’ve heard wonderful things from them. It’s doing great work.”