The most important among them are ensuring safety, promoting healing, and providing personal space.
Nicole Groshek from National Business Furniture writes about these things and more to help you choose the right furniture for your healthcare facility.
Choosing the Right Behavioral Health Furniture
If you’re outfitting a behavioral health facility with new furniture, you’ve got a lot of factors to take into consideration, and they’re all important. The challenge of furnishing this type of healthcare facility is that you’ll need to somehow accommodate individuals with vastly different needs from one another due to the great range in mental illnesses that behavioral health facilities treat. Here’s what you absolutely must consider before selecting your new furniture.
Ensure Safety. The number one most important consideration when it comes to selecting behavioral health furniture is patient and caregiver safety. Avoid providing any opportunity for patients to harm caregivers, other patients or themselves. This applies to every facet of your facility. For example, fasteners should be tamper-resistant, and there should be no exposed staples or other catch points on any furniture items. Eliminate the possibility for stashed contraband by providing no concealment points in chairs or other furniture. There should also be no ligature points made available to any patient, which means that chairs should be armless or have closed arm panels, and cabinets and doors should be fitted with breakaway hooks and hinges. When it comes to freestanding chairs, sled base models are often preferred as they are harder to weaponize. Ensure that you equip your facility with absolutely no furniture that has removable parts, and outfit patient rooms with open shelving rather than cabinets with drawers and doors. Windows should be outfitted with unbreakable glass. See full post
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