St Andrew's Healthcare

Removable Safety Padding

St Andrew’s Healthcare is a specialist mental health charity providing care for those with complex mental health problems. They needed a flexible padding solution that could be used across one of their transitional wards, where padding could easily be put up or removed to suit each patient’s needs quickly and effectively.

Project Requirements:

• Removable & Secure: Padding that can be easily installed and removed by the nursing team, but not so easily removed by their patients.
• Anti-Ligature & Infection Control Safe: To ensure patients safety and to meet healthcare infection control guidelines.
• A Flexible Solution: Padding that could be used across a range of the wards different sized rooms.

Rhino’s Padding Solution

Removable & Secure

Narrow Padding: Thinner and narrower safety padding was used for easy assembly and transportation by the wards nursing staff. Measuring only 500mm in width, the special padding provides the same protection levels as thicker fixed padding.

Brackets & Magnets: The padding is safely secured to the room’s walls using a dual bracket and magnet system. The brackets along the top of the padding are kept out of the way of prying hands, strongly bolting the pads to the wall. Whilst powerful magnetic strips lining the pads’ ends stop them from being easily ripped off the walls.

Anti-Ligature & Infection Control Safe

Magnetic Wooden Beams: In keeping with the room’s aesthetic, detachable magnetic hardwood beams have been used to cover up the padding brackets, removing the risk of ligatures and ensuing patients safety when they’re left alone. The beams offer a similar hard-wearing strength of a fixed panel and the flexibility of a removable Velcro pad. When the padding isn’t being used, the wooden beams blend in as part of the room’s decor, creating a calming environment.

Infection Control Safe: Our handmade padding is tightly stitched with hardwearing, easy to clean vinyl, perfect for shared use in infection control environments.

A Flexible Solution

Conscious Convenience: Accessible cut-outs in the padding were widened to accommodate the different location of plugs and switches across the ward. This special design feature offers patients and staff access to the rooms key features without compromising safety.

Purposeful Padding: Standard padding is typically made to measure, but St Andrew’s wanted their removable padding to fit a variety of different sized rooms for full flexibility on the ward – which presented us with a new challenge. We used narrower pads that could easily be used in a mix and match style to fit each room type; for ease of use, the padding was colour coded with the wall brackets, so staff wouldn’t have a hard time configuring the room’s padding, speeding up assembly times.