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Design Bugs Out: Porter’s Chair

The Design Bugs Out Porter's Chair under test

Comfortable and easy to use for staff and patients, the design of the porter’s chair aids cleaning after every use.

The challenge

Porters’ chairs pose a unique challenge. They travel all over the hospital – inside and out – and are subject to a lot of wear and tear. They have multiple, and very different, users (porters, patients, nurses and visitors), and an ageing population means demand for them will increase. So how can good design keep them clean and help fight the spread of hospital acquired infection?

Current models of porters’ chairs tend to have a number of disadvantages in usability. For example they may be easier to pull backwards than push forwards and have little room for patients’ belongings, which often end up on their lap. They are not currently constructed with ease of cleaning in mind, often comprising many components so there are joints and hard-to-clean welds and gaps, all providing potential traps for dirt and bacteria.

The team at Minima have designed the new chair for much easier cleaning and improved usability. Speed of cleaning is important as it helps to encourage more cleaning, especially by staff with very little time.

For some patients the experience of going into hospital can be daunting, so the chair has been designed to address this as well as being easy and safe to use by everyone.

Design solution

The design team thought about how the porter’s chair is used, and did extensive research on user touchpoints, looking at who touches which parts of the chair and what the potential is for spreading infection. Using coloured chalk on the hands of porters and patients, Minima was able to map high contact areas and identify aspects of the chair that needed redesigning. For example, the footrest is an area which is currently handled by porters to deploy it. If the design team could come up with a solution which avoided any need to touch it, the spread of infection from patients’ shoes could be reduced immediately.

Minima consulted a variety of experts including infection control nurses, porters, lifting and handling experts and other healthcare staff at Ipswich and Great Yarmouth hospitals. Minima’s manufacturing partner for the competition, Vernacare, also consulted widely with Bolton and Durham Hospitals as well as their own advisory group of care practitioners. The feedback from all groups was extremely useful and the resulting design has been very positively received.

The Design Bugs Out Porters’ Chair is easy to clean

Considering the basic design of most porters’ chairs has seen very little development for 30-40 years, Minima started with a blank sheet of paper and designed the new chair from scratch. Everything from different construction techniques, materials and production processes to the number of wheels was examined. They looked at improving manoeuvrability and patient comfort, and improving the brakes and the stability of the chair. They soon realised that patients’ sense of well-being is important, so not only did the chair need to be practical, but it also had to feel safe to sit in, look clean and be easy to wheel around.

Any hospital item used by the general public has to be extremely robust and strong to stand up to wear and tear and harsh cleaning chemicals. Plastics are a good way to achieve this as they are strong and don’t have paint or other coatings that can chip off, providing crevices for bacteria.

Results

An easy-to-use porter’s chair that has very few dirt traps and is quick and easy to clean. The chair incorporates an innovative footrest which rests on the floor, but raises as the patient’s weight is applied to the seat, thereby eliminating the need to put hands where patients place their feet. The surfaces of the chair are smooth and easy to clean and any joins are carefully located to reduce the risk of trapping harmful bacteria.

The main mouldings, the bulk of the chair, are reduced to only three parts, making it much easier to take apart for deep cleaning or replacement (current chairs are often thrown out when they are damaged, so the new design should be better value for the NHS). The arms swing out of the way for lateral transfer of patients, and the leg supports can either come straight out or angle down at 20 degrees to give support without the need to elevate the whole leg to horizontal.

The plastic is a polypropylene variant, which is tough, durable and has very good chemical resistance against cleaning products (it is often used for products such as baby changing tables and parts of hospital beds). The main parts for the chair will be rotary moulded, which is a good way of creating objects with large, smooth, uninterrupted surfaces.

As well as the patient, chairs are used to transport their belongings and other medical equipment, so storage is another important design consideration. The new design incorporates storage space for gas bottles and patient documents and a flat base under the seat provides a storage area for the patient’s belongings.

The design has an innovative braking system that locks all four wheels at once, making the chair safer to get in and out of, and there is a hook to carry colostomy bags – another source of infection for patients. The new design uses light coloured materials, which helps to demonstrate to patients that it is clean, and antibacterial wipes fit into a holder on the chair to encourage frequent cleaning.

Design: Minima Manufacture: Vernacare