Choosing Furniture for a Mental Health Facility
Choosing furniture for a mental health facility comes with a number of considerations alongside the usual factors such as aesthetics and durability. As well as being tough enough to tolerate the rigours of challenging behaviour, furniture for mental health facilities has to meet essential regulations.
Pleasing design and strong build
At Reinforced Beds, we understand the value of an aesthetically pleasing environment and the days of using custodial style furniture in a mental health unit are thankfully behind us. Nonetheless, there are practical considerations to take into account. Service users with challenging behaviour may seek to damage their environment, so furniture for a mental health care facility needs to withstand this.
What type of furniture do Reinforced Beds offer for mental health facilities?
Whilst all of our furniture is robust, some of our ranges have features that make them especially suitable for an environment that experiences challenging behaviour. Take something like the Extreme Ellerton Sofa, which is incredibly robust and comes with features like anti-tamper fixings to ensure the safety and comfort of service users and your team.
Our furniture is designed to create a beautiful environment and we are increasingly choosing to use natural hues and finishes where practical. Take our range of lounge furniture for challenging environments. As well as superb safety features like rounded edges and security screws as standard, we offer a range of wooden finishes to help create an environment that harnesses the benefits of biophilic design.
Safety of service users
Guidance from the Department of Health discusses the need for furniture to consider service users' physical safety alongside mental well-being.
“All furniture and fittings are required to be robust, anti-ligature, prevent opportunities for concealment and meet infection control requirements while being as domestic in style as possible and not offering opportunities for easy lifting or breakage.”
As well as being robust, much of our furniture has specific anti-ligature features, such as the omission of doors or drawers. We also offer furniture with sloping tops to remove the potential for climbing.
Find out more
Choosing the best furniture for a mental health unit requires special attention. Creating an environment that is pleasant to be in, safe for service users and strong enough to cope with the increased wear that is a natural part of these environments is a fine balance and can feel overwhelming. Our team is happy to talk through your options, so get in touch with any questions and take the first steps towards creating the ideal environment for your facility.