DOORS
Ensuring the right doors are not just an afterthought
According to Paul Coley, UK Commercial manager at Dortek, doors in healthcare environments ‘can sometimes be an afterthought within the design process, despite being probably the one interior element touched most frequently, and used by everyone’. Selecting the right hospital doors is essential for hygiene, efficiency, fire safety, acoustics, aesthetics, and air quality. Here he examines the potential difficulties encountered when specifying doors in the modern healthcare environment, and how to overcome them.
Healthcare facilities provide a demanding and hostile environment within which a door is required to function. For the specifier, who will often require hundreds of different doors for many different purposes, selecting the correct product can seem a daunting task. The growing demands of hygiene legislation and infection and prevention and control protocols, increasing pressure on hospitals to ensure that product performance matches the demands of the environment, and a renewed focus on lifetime costs, mean that there are now more elements to consider than ever before.
Common mistakes One of the most common mistakes made when selecting doors for installation in healthcare premises is specifying a particular product or system, sometimes without taking full account of its function. For example, while two doors in the same hospital may both need to offer a one- hour fire rating, their operational use could be totally different. A one-hour fire rated door specified for a corridor area will
not necessarily be suitable for use within an intensive care unit. Suppliers, who are, by nature, specialists in the design, manufacture, and fitting of door products in the healthcare sector, can advise on the correct type of door to suit a particular application, room, or area.
Materials A key aspect of a successful infection control policy, beyond general hygiene, is choosing the correct materials for both the construction of the room and the activities within it. Traditionally, many healthcare facility doors are either painted timber, timber laminate, or timber-cored, with a PVC outer finish. However, due to increasing standards of hygiene and infection control, timber-free hygienic glass reinforced polyester (GRP) is becoming an increasingly popular choice for doorsets. This applies not only to high-hygiene areas such as intensive care units, isolation rooms, operating theatres, recovery areas, and CSSD units, but also to other high-risk areas like pharmacy cleanrooms, laboratories, X-ray rooms,
and hydrotherapy pools. Hygienic GRP is a high-technology engineering composite, manufactured from millions of strands of glass fibre and polyester resin. Doors are produced using a unique closed mould process, creating a strong, uniform product with no seams or joins on the door surface, and no holes or crevices within. Unlike alternatives, colour is built into the door during the manufacturing process, and the outer skin has a gel coat finish that is chemically bonded to the glass fibre, ensuring that doors will never require repainting or refinishing – avoiding costly shutdowns and maintenance throughout the door’s lifetime.
Organic timber doors not suitable for all areas
While timber or laminate doors may be ideal for many areas within a healthcare facility (such as corridors, waiting areas, wards, and general office space), in areas where cleanliness and hygiene are critical to patient safety, timber-cored products aren’t generally acceptable. You wouldn’t expect to see trolleys, benches, or operating theatre tables made using products with timber cores, yet we still see doors in these areas manufactured from timber.
When used in areas such as operating Hygienic GRP doors in a modular operating theatre. 104 Health Estate Journal October 2023
theatres, doors can be subject to damage on a regular basis, with trolleys and beds being manoeuvred in confined spaces inevitably hitting both the door and its frame. Timber and timber-encapsulated PVC doors are not only weaker than hygienic GRP doors, and thus more easily damaged, but can also pose a higher risk, as a knock or chip may reveal organic materials below where bacteria could reproduce. Damage also makes them virtually impossible both to clean and keep clean effectively. It is worth noting that hygienic GRP doors can be repaired, often in situ, meaning less disruption, and far lower ongoing maintenance costs or even costly replacement.
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