At Healthcare Estates 2010 Kaba Door Systems demonstrated how its products can not only provide contact-free access for all, but can also contribute to meeting privacy and dignity guidelines and energy efficiency directives.
“Efficiently designed automatic doors, working properly, provide an excellent access solution within a hospital environment, and can contribute significantly both towards helping to reduce heat loss, and improving the “user-friendliness” of the facility by ensuring unimpeded contact-free access, in turn bringing comfort and convenience to everyday life,” says Kaba Door Systems. “They satisfy both appropriate legislation, such as the Disability Discrimination Act, Building Regulations (Part M and B), the Health & Safety at Work Act:1974 and BS7036:1996, and guidelines set out in a recent report by the Chief Nursing Officer, ‘Privacy and Dignity – A report into mixed sex accommodation in hospitals’, which highlight ward bay doors as just one of the ways that privacy and dignity can be increased for patients; improving visual and auditory privacy via screening and providing confidential discussion areas.”
Kaba Door Systems explains that automatic sliding, folding, or curved sliding doors can provide an opening of 60% of the structural width. They reportedly offer improved user-friendliness, and “lifetime cost benefits” via “reliability, endurance and unimpeded contact-free use”. Doors can be mounted in paired series to provide an “air-lock” style tunnel to effectively reduce wind chill.
Recent installations undertaken by Kaba at Colchester General Hospital have incorporated “the technologically advanced” sliding door system SLX to satisfy privacy and dignity guidelines. The doors “section off” wards into smaller bays, and feature manifestations to obscure direct views into the patient areas.
Kaba says: “Many buildings still feature many manual swing doors which are initially very cost-effective, but, due to their design, can easily be left open. This problem can be overcome by fitting automatic door openers to existing doors; a cost-effective solution that improves access and reduces heat loss.”
To optimise operating efficiency, Kaba stresses the need for regular, ongoing door system maintenance, adding: “Maintenance costs for keeping doors operating properly can be high, and with many facilities now supporting a greater number and variety of applications over multiple sites, there has never been more of a need for an experienced partner to ensure all internal and external doors are properly maintained and operating effectively.”
Planned preventative maintenance (PPM) anticipates the wear, tear, and changes all doors are subject to, while continuous monitoring ensures peak efficiency and minimises deterioration. PPM programmes offer customers dedicated single-point contact, door schedules detailing door type, age, and operating lifetime, asset registers and asset ageing, door spend reports, and maintenance and renewal costing for budget consideration and consolidated payment plans.
Kaba Door Systems not only offers a comprehensive range of automatic sliding, folding, and swinging doors, industrial roller shutters, sectional overhead doors, high speed doors, and fire protection solutions, but also a nationwide maintenance service, together with 24-hour emergency repair coverage by local engineers.
A dedicated aftersales division can “tailor” maintenance programmes to suit customers’ needs and budgets.
