Watch a film about the Patient Bedside System on Vimeo.
Geoff Hollington
Design consultant
Traditional hospital bedside furniture
Right now in hospitals in the UK the sort of... what we would call the amenity needs of patients close to the bedside are typically covered by two... actually pieces of furniture really. There’s a bedside locker, which is a little cupboard, and there’s a table which goes over the bed.
Bob Wood
International Vice President of research, design and development, Herman Miller
We saw an opportunity of designing products that would improve the whole business of infection control.
Geoff Hollington
The breakthrough moment
I think we had a kind of a landmark sort of ah-ha moment in a team meeting when it was suggested that, actually, we weren’t looking for a piece of furniture at all but we were looking for something modular, something which was systematic.
Design for cleanability
The products that do this job at the moment are made from wood and plastic laminate. They are not designed to be easily cleaned. So we’ve used plastics for this product. We’ve made the shapes very smooth and curved. We don’t have any sharp corners, any, any nasty sort of crevices or places where dirt can, can gather. In a sense, clean-ability has kind of driven the shape and the materials for the product.
Expert input into the design process
We had a team of consultants, Barron Gould, who specialise in materials and, and colour design, stressing clean-ability. We knew we were using plastics. We wanted to use the right plastics. We also had help from the expert reference group at the Design Council, specifically on issues surrounding the, the properties of plastics and the fact that bugs can actually stick to some plastics under some circumstances, which is quite complicated but we needed to understand that.
The choice of materials
We’ve used polypropylene, which is a... quite a familiar plastic for everyone. It’s very, very tough. It’s very light and it’s relatively low in cost. We’ve also used melamine, which is a very tough, very hardwearing, very scratch proof, almost ceramic like material.
Bob Wood
Design to change behaviour
How people live in and operate within the bedside environment was key to it, and if you designed a solution that helped that behaviour change, that would be key to resolving the problem.
Geoff Hollington
We’ve created a design which patients can use themselves. They can move it around. They can easily access their stuff.
The design process
We had a very, very fast iterative process. We had a hospital bed brought into the factory here at Herman Miller. We, we built cardboard and foam prototypes. We got people to try them out.
The importance of prototyping
So this is the prototype that was used in the hospital in Bath for testing with patients and staff and cleaners. They were able to sort of explore what it would be like to get their hands in here, to clean under here, and clean under here, and all this kind of stuff. And of course they could see that they'd be able to take this off, in order to clean it properly and put it back on again.
The future impact of the design
I think that our team has come up with a design which which will help to significantly tackle healthcare associated infections in hospitals.
I’m confident that, at some point in the future, patients will be going into hospitals and finding something that’s closely related to our solution next to their bed.