PRODUCT TESTING
Taking some guesswork out of product selection
The products selected for mental healthcare settings can significantly impact service-user and staff safety, but until now, believe the Design in Mental Health Network and multidisciplinary building science centre, BRE, specifiers have had no simple means of ensuring a product will be fit for purpose without themselves spending considerable time, effort, and money undertaking extensive, sometimes ‘haphazard’, testing. To address this, they have developed a guide to testing the ligature risk and robustness of a broad spectrum of such products. The guidance also focuses on some of the most important characteristics for doors and windows. The Network’s editor, Jonathan Baillie, spoke to DiMHN Innovation & Testing Workstream lead, Philip Ross.
The new guidance, which is downloadable free of charge at
https://tinyurl.com/ y95mcbjz, and is entitled Informed Choices: Testing Guidance for Products in Mental Health Facilities, is the culmination of over six years’ work by the DiMHN and the BRE, who have drawn extensively, in creating it, on the expertise, knowledge, and experience, of a wide range of stakeholders – from architects, interior designers, and product manufacturers, to estates and facilities personnel, clinical and nursing staff, and service-users. Published in April, the new Testing Guide aims to: l Ensure that patient safety is not compromised through inappropriate selection of products for current and future use;
l Communicate product testing requirements to manufacturers to enable them to supply a product ‘appropriate for the environment in which it is to be used’;
l Help procurement teams better evaluate manufacturers’ trade literature;
l Discourage the ‘proliferation of unique product testing methods’ by NHS Trusts and other bodies;
l Set minimum acceptable standards for products, ensuring they are within stringent NHS cost limits and requirements imposed on mental health facilities;
l Provide performance categorisation criteria for products that can easily be referred to by contractors, specifiers, procurement teams, and manufacturers; l Improve efficiency and design costs.
Bringing together many disparate requirements
The DiMHN and BRE explain: “The Testing Guide provides testing methodologies for materials, fixtures, and hardware, specifically designed for use within mental healthcare facilities. It brings together the many disparate requirements for these
THE NETWORK | JULY 2020
The new guidance is the culmination of over six years’ work by the DiMHN and the BRE, who have drawn on the expertise, knowledge, and experience, of a wide range of stakeholders.
products into one document, enabling suitably qualified experts to choose the most appropriate product. It will form the basic test methodology for a new certification scheme to be run by BRE Global Ltd.”
The intention is for BRE to begin offering independent testing by this autumn, a process delayed slightly by the impact of the coronavirus outbreak on the final stages of preparation. From then, manufacturers of a wide range of products destined for mental healthcare use will be able to submit them for testing. BRE will then rigorously test them at its Watford facility, based on the criteria set out in the guidance, and then, provided they meet the criteria and standards set out, certify them to a particular performance level, signified by the awarding of a ‘grading’. For example, if testing a doorset’s robustness, a certification and grading of 5 would indicate its suitability for a high-secure
environment – where it might be subject to repeated and determined attack, while a ‘3’ would suggest that it would be better suited to a medium or low secure setting. The new guidance gives detailed information on testing the ligature risk and robustness of a broad range of products, and also focuses on specific aspects of window and door performance that the BRE and DiMHN consider especially important in mental healthcare settings – with windows these are cleanability and light and air transmission characteristics, and with doorsets, anti-barricade properties.
Based on real-world experience Philip Ross says: “The new guidance’s publication is a significant milestone in making available to manufacturers some solid, thoroughly evaluated testing guidance based on real-world experience. It should prove invaluable to specifiers – both by clearly identifying what performance characteristics a particular product type should possess to make it safe for use in settings of a certain acuity, and in enabling potential purchasers to more meaningfully compare the performance of BRE-tested products to help them make a more informed buying choice. Informed Choices: Testing Guidance for Products in Mental Health Facilities has taken considerable work and extensive discussion – including stakeholder workshops held throughout the UK over the past 2-3 years – to compile. We believe it will make a real difference, not only by enabling mental healthcare providers to better select appropriate products based on the risk level and service-user group where they will be used, but also in encouraging manufacturers to innovate. Once a product has been BRE-tested and certified, a specifier will be able to buy it confident in the knowledge that it will suit the task and environment in hand, minimising risks to
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