WASHROOM HYGIENE The rules of washroom design
Tina Bowden, Sales Manager at Dudley Industries, takes a look at the cost, safety and laws around washroom design, starting with the important question of compliance.
In workplaces, educational premises, public buildings and other settings, washrooms are an essential amenity and required by law. However, good washroom design is about much more than meeting obligations and ticking a regulatory box: it can also make a significant contribution to cost control, user safety, workplace morale and even an organisation’s brand identity.
Legal requirements
Certain rules govern the provision of facilities in buildings where employees routinely operate. The Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992 require that ‘suitable and sufficient sanitary conveniences shall be provided at readily accessible places’. A companion document – the Approved Code Of Practice – specifies minimum requirements and notes the need to ensure accessibility for people with disabilities.
More details about exactly what facilities employers should provide are set out in the Health & Safety Executive’s free Welfare At Work guide. The guide offers advice on the services that should be provided including, for example,
how many washbasins should be installed for workforces of different sizes.
Cost considerations
High rates of inflation have dominated recent headlines and thrown the question of cost control into even sharper focus. Washroom design and maintenance are not generally top of most companies’ lists of investment priorities, especially when facing a recession, but good design principles still merit attention because they can actively save businesses money.
Staff time
On a day-to-day basis, the largest but least visible washroom costs typically relate to staff or contractor time: the need for operatives to visit washrooms for the purposes of inspection, replenishing consumables, cleaning, and emptying bins. Logically, these are often the activities on which the greatest savings can be made.
Labour can be expensive, so the more that a designer can do to ‘specify out’ the need for physical intervention, the more cost-efficient the solution is likely to be. For example, while
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