Designing better mental healthcare facilities

Taking some guess work out of product selection

The Design in Mental Health Network and multidisciplinary building science centre, BRE have jointly developed a guide to testing a broad spectrum of products used in mental healthcare facilities to ensure fitness for purpose.

The products selected for mental healthcare settings can significantly impact service-user and staff safety, but until now, believe the Design in Mental Health Network and multidisciplinary building science centre, BRE, specifiers have had no simple means of ensuring a product will be fit for purpose without themselves spending considerable time, effort, and money undertaking extensive, sometimes ‘haphazard’, testing. To address this, they have developed a guide to testing the ligature risk and robustness of a broad spectrum of such products. The guidance also focuses on some of the most important characteristics for doors and windows. The Network’s editor, Jonathan Baillie, spoke to DiMHN Innovation & Testing Workstream lead, Philip Ross.

The new guidance, which is downloadable free of charge at https://tinyurl.com/ y95mcbjz, and is entitled Informed Choices: Testing Guidance for Products in Mental Health Facilities, is the culmination of over six years’ work by the DiMHN and the BRE, who have drawn extensively, in creating it, on the expertise, knowledge, and experience, of a wide range of stakeholders – from architects, interior designers, and product manufacturers, to estates and facilities personnel, clinical and nursing staff, and service-users.

Published in April, the new Testing Guide aims to:

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