Are you a medical institution facility planner or manager? Are you a medical practice owner? If so, you are all interested in protecting the investment you've made in your facility. I know this from working with so many of you over the course of 20 years.
Here are three inexpensive -- and blissfully low-tech -- ways to protect your architectural investment, future-proof your facility, and obsolete obsolescence.
These methods are not new. They've been proven true since the late 1960's. Today, manufacturers are making the solutions aesthetically more pleasing than ever before, while still providing the high-level of functionality that the nurses who inspired these designs decades ago wanted, and still need today. With the advent of so much more technology involved in patient care now, these solutions are needed even more so.
1. Equipment Rail
The first equipment rail was invented by Ernst Schindele and was sold under his company's brand, Fairfield Medical Products. The genesis of the rail is important. Ernst spoke to nurses, learned their challenges, and worked with his team of engineers to solve those challenges. Thus the equipment rail was born.
How the rail was born is important to understand because it came from a perspective of understanding a problem, designing and testing potential solutions, and then, and only then, finally launching a product into the medical marketplace.
So what is equipment rail? In today's version, which is manufactured by Paladin Medical Products, owned by Ernst's son Gary Schindele, the equipment rail is a horizontally-mounted piece of extruded aluminum that forms a small, elegant rail. (See picture.) The rail screws into the wall of your exam room, patient room, bathroom, procedure room, storage room; you're limited only by your imagination.
The second key part of the equipment rail is the accessory brackets. Paladin makes aluminum brackets that fasten into the back of medical supplies, devices, and storage items, and then clamp onto the rail.
Wherever you want it.
That's the best part, the real value. The brackets are designed to be quick-release. Safe and secure while clamped onto the rail, but with a twist of the hand, the clamp removes from the rail, allowing the nurse or doctor to relocate their equipment, supplies, devices to another, more convenient location on their rail.
You'll be hard-pressed to find another more immediate, and inexpensive, way to improve workflow and patient flow in your practice or institution.
An additional innovative solution Paladin applies to their rails: An antimicrobial finish. Infection prevention is in the Top 5 of every healthcare owner's "Must Do List." The costs associated with healthcare-acquired infections is by far the biggest waste of funds, and lives. Every supplier or vendor to the healthcare industry should be incorporating some form of infection prevention principle into the design of their product.
(Read more about infection prevention tips from About.com's medical supplies expert, Brain Carmody.)
2. Infection Prevention Devices Where You Need Them
Speaking of infection prevention, today, these devices are one of the primary categories that are drilled directly into the walls. The problem is, items like hand sanitizer dispensers, paper towel holders, glove boxes, sani-wipes, and sharps containers are generally considered commodities, and therefore purchasing contracts are negotiated often in order to get the lowest price.
That means vendors change often.
That also means change, physical change, to your facility. Maintenance staff are deployed to remove the above dispensers from the walls and replace them with the new contract-holder's unit.
The new one often has a slightly different size and shape, and it often won't fit in the same footprint the former unit had allocated to it on the wallspace.
Now, not only are you left with holes in the walls, exposed until someone has time to fill them in, the maintenance person is tasked with finding any open spot that will fit the new device. Thus, all of the time invested by the planning committee as to where specifically they want each of the infection prevention devices placed, has been discarded and rendered wasted time.
The equipment rail system prevents that waste, as well as the exposed holes in your walls. The maintenance person swaps the mounting bracket from the former to the new device, and re-clamps it to its designated space on the rail.
I've seen it happen. It's so easy and quick and effective that it almost leaves you shaking your head saying, "It can't be that easy."
It is.
3. Medical Devices and Supplies
In addition to infection prevention devices, medical devices and medical supplies can be stowed on the walls within arm's reach of the caregiving team as well.
The system works the same. A bracket screws into the back of the device, and then the device clamps onto the rail. The caregiver can relocate it instantly to a better spot in the room (where there is rail) instantly. No work order needed. No waiting. Just doing. Now.
So obviously, it's not a leap to see that staff satisfaction has become another major benefit to the equipment rail system.