One of the UK’s leading fabricators and installers of commercial glazing, Britplas, says it plans to work with manufacturers and suppliers of a wide range of hardware, fixtures, fittings, and furniture supplied into mental healthcare facilities to establish uniform tests that will enable NHS specifiers to buy such items confident that they are safe, fit-for-purpose, robust, and do not, for example, claim to have an anti-ligature design when they do not.
The glazing specialist – which doubled its turnover last year – is in the process of moving to a new 42,000 ft2 factory in Warrington, and, chairman, Kevin Gorman, explained, will devote part of it to a mock-up of a mental healthcare facility bedroom, and to a “lab”, where new products can be tested for strength, robustness, durability, and anti-ligature design. A member of the Design in Mental Health Network, a not-for-profit organisation which seeks to improve the mental healthcare environment, Kevin Gorman says he and other Network members are concerned that the design of many products destined for mental healthcare facilities, ranging from door handles and windows to vision panels (see also article, pages 71-80), is currently neither regulated nor governed by mandatory standards specific to their use in such facilities, meaning personnel seeking to buy them have to undertake their own testing, potentially both an expensive and time-consuming process. He says: “Not only do mental healthcare Trusts thus have to obtain numerous samples on which to undertake their own tests, but they also have no uniform standards on which to base them. “As things stand, sharp sales personnel selling, for instance, door and window hardware into such facilities, may often convince the unfortunate NHS customer that a frequently lower-cost product is fitfor- purpose, in, for instance, having an anti-ligature design, and being sufficiently robust for the application, but where, given that they have no way of verifying such claims, is the evidence? “Consequently, some facilities may receive substandard products, with the only recourse then being to rip the whole lot out and start again. Uniform tests, which we intend to develop and perfect with expert input and advice – from product designers, architects, and design consultants, estates, clinical, and psychiatric personnel – would give such personnel the assurance that what they were buying really was fit-for-purpose, also significantly reducing the risk of patients self-harming, or even killing themselves, on badly-designed hardware. “Once we have a series of tests, we hope to involve an independent, authoritative organisation to take on and manage testing in the future.”
