Working toward unified product testing

We keep banging the drum about the importance of clear standards for products used in mental health environments. The current lack of guidance and consensus on how to test products means clients procure and test samples in silos – and the performance criteria can be different for each NHS or private provider. It is often a long and costly process with inconsistent results, and sometimes limits the number of products considered by clinical and design teams – sometimes to just one preferred, restricting adoption of the latest innovation that could address some of the major problems in mental health. The limited scope of current testing also risks issues not being spotted before products are actually deployed for use in ‘live’ ward environments, and unfortunately in mental health, when something goes wrong, the consequences could be as extreme as a fatality or severe injury to a serviceuser or staff member. 

MORE THAN JUST RAISING AWARENESS

The Design in Mental Health Network is, of course, about more than just raising awareness, and has been actively involved in taking action to improve the quality of mental health bedrooms –from its development and championing of the Better Bedroom Initiative, to the publication of our own design guides (such as Design with People in Mindand The Sound Issue). Our next major goal – and this is an initiative on which we have been working with the leading built environment consultancy, the BRE, since late 2014, is to enable clients and architects to evaluate products with confidence – just like any other sector of the construction industry. We intend doing this by developing, in conjunction with BRE, and subsequently launching, a suite of standards to enable particular categories of products commonly used in mental healthcare settings of different acuity to be tested in a way that not only provides specifiers such as NHS Trusts with assurance that they will ‘perform’ as required – in key areas such as robustness and anti-ligature – but also allows, and indeed facilitates, meaningful comparison.