The most common flooring problems for healthcare facilities start with sanitation, slip and fall resistance and durability, but what other factors should you consider when making these important choosing a new floor? Selecting the optimal healthcare flooring solutions plays an integral part in running and maintaining a clean, sanitary, and aesthetically pleasing environment that both reassures and welcomes patients, families, visitors, and staff alike.
Slip and Fall Resistance
Any flooring intended for hospitals and other health care facilities needs to consider slip and fall accidents. There are two material problems here you need to solve:
Reducing Falls: Patients are often unable to walk properly, and/or they may struggle with low energy. You need floors to possess a surface or texturing that reduces the likelihood of slips and falls. Material needs to give increased grip when walking on it.
Reducing Impact: The second problem is reducing the impact of a fall. As much as you can work to reduce falls through flooring choice, you’re still treating sick and injured patients. Even with the perfect floor, someone at some point is still bound to fall. When this happens, the floor needs to possess qualities that mitigate impact. In this way, the severity of any falling injury is lessened. What might be a broken bone on a harder floor may only be a bruise on a floor with some give and shock absorbency.
An added benefit is that these surfaces are easier on your staff’s bodies. Personnel who are on their feet all day often develop joint and back pain. A surface with shock absorbent qualities reduces the risk of productivity- and satisfaction-sapping aches and pains.
Floor Height Changes: Aside from the two problems that need to be solved in material choice, there’s a third facet to slip and fall resistance. This has to do with design and installation. When changing surfaces from one room to another, surfaces must remain even. Patients who can’t lift their feet very high can struggle with flooring lips and even minor height changes. Any variation in flooring height should be gradual to avoid patients (and staff) tripping.
Sanitary Flooring
Infection resistance is the most basic element that healthcare flooring solutions need to meet. Sanitary flooring is a must. This means a floor that repels fluids and bacteria and is easy to clean:
Rejects Germs: MRSA and staph infections are passed at a disproportionately high rate in hospital settings. Flooring must be seamless and non-porous. You also need flash coving that extends several inches up the wall. This key element eliminates the risk of anything getting under the floor through the floor-wall crease.
Easy to Clean: Surfaces need to be easy and quick to clean, so that any spills can be wiped up and disinfected immediately. Spills increase infection risk, as well as slip and fall risk. The easier and quicker the floor is to clean and disinfect, the quicker you eliminate these risks.
Durability in Healthcare Flooring Solutions
Healthcare flooring solutions need to last. A floor that you need to replace in a few short years does not give you the return on your investment you need. Money saved on cheap flooring can often come back to bite you in the form of expensive maintenance, repair, and re-installation costs:
Avoid Sunk Costs: It’s difficult to balance cost with capability. You don’t have unlimited funds. At the same time, a floor must be built to last. Having to replace it quickly will be more of a sunk cost than simply investing in the most appropriate flooring.
Increase Staff Efficiency: Additionally, flooring with low maintenance costs means money you can save on staff operations. If it takes staff even just 5 minutes less per day to clean each section of hallway, how many sections of hallway do you have? Perhaps 10, 20, even more? This can quickly add up to hours of saved time per day, which can help you devote that staff time to other needed maintenance or to cut staff costs.
Uplifting Aesthetic
Aesthetic Impacts Mood: The aesthetic that a floor communicates needs to make intimidating hospital spaces feel reassuring and inviting. Easing patients and their families into an environment is key. It can reduce patient stress, as well as reducing potential conflict between patients, their families, and medical staff. The aesthetic is crucial for how you welcome patients in and for how you maintain patients’ spirits during a longer stay.
Sound Propagation
Getting Sound Sleep: Often overlooked is the effect that sound propagation has on patient stress. Areas where patients are sleeping must be able to cut down on echoes and reverberations. Otherwise, staff and other patients walking up and down the hallway can keep patients up and drastically increase stress. This is one of the easiest and most efficient ways to cut down on patient stress, yet it’s not as highly valued a factor as it should be.
Patient Satisfaction Scores
Satisfaction scores have a large impact on patient choice. When you keep patients coming in through your doors, you boost reimbursement and thus the performance of your hospital. Keep in mind that each of the factors mentioned here can have consequences on patient satisfaction:
- Reducing the likelihood of slips and falls shores up your facility’s safety status among patients.
- Reducing the impact of falls makes the environment safer.
- Reducing infections that can spread through hospitals is one of the primary ways to maintain your reputation, as well as patient health.
- Floors that are durable will look good and perform well for far longer. Floors that are damaged will make patients wonder that if you don’t even take care of the floor, how can they expect you’ll take care of them?
- Good looking, reassuring floors with interesting patterns and design will make an environment feel welcoming and help to reduce stress and conflict.
- Remember sound propagation. A patient who can sleep soundly will heal faster, and be far less stressed.
When considering healthcare flooring solutions, you need an experienced contractor. East Coast Flooring has extensive experience with effective, sanitary flooring installation in a variety of healthcare environments. Our team can help take you through your choices, and more importantly, understand how to balance each of these factors in the most efficient ways.
