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Choosing Flooring for Healthcare Facilities

hospital
Healthcare industry has gone through a lot of changes in the past decade. But the tendency is evident: now more than ever hospitals, doctor’s offices and urgent care clinics depend on the experience and opinion of their patients. And while it may sound trivial, having the right flooring can help you impress and satisfy your patients in many ways. Allow our concrete coating experts to give you a few tips on what to look for when choosing flooring for your medical facility.

Healthcare Flooring Challenges

Whether your facility provides patient care or conducts medical research, it has to meet certain requirements and standards, especially when it comes to finishes used on various surfaces. When we install flooring in medical facilities, we often have to find solutions for the following challenges:

Slip and Fall Accidents

Needless to say, you don’t want anyone slipping and falling in a hospital, whether it’s patients or staff. Meanwhile, hospital patients are among people most likely to slip and fall. They may be weak, dizzy, unfit, injured or otherwise prone to slipping. Therefore, flooring, especially in waiting and in-patient care areas, should be as slip-resistant as possible. Since healthcare providers don’t get reimbursed for treatment of injuries received inside the facility, minimizing such injuries is one of the main priorities.

Infection Resistance

Whether it’s a large hospital or a small doctor’s office, you probably have to deal with sick and potentially infectious patients. Cleanliness and sanitation are of utmost importance in healthcare, but it also helps to have surfaces that don’t leave space for bacteria to get lodged in. So you want flooring (and probably wall coatings as well) that are seamless, smooth and non-porous. MRSA infections are common in healthcare settings, especially in people with compromised immune systems. Staph germs can be present on healthy individuals and passed around via various surfaces they’ve touched, including walls and flooring.

Tough & Durable

A lot happens in a healthcare setting: vials fall and break into a thousand pieces, patients spill bodily fluids on the floor, heavy carts are rolled back and forth all day long. You need flooring that can take heavy use (and sometimes abuse) without becoming dull and unattractive. This flooring has to be resistant to impact, stains, scratches and chemicals, as well as stand up well to frequent cleaning.

Attracting Patients and Staff

The bottom line is that every healthcare facility is a business that needs to attract and delight both customers and employees. Since flooring is one of the first things patients see when they walk in, it plays a key role in creating positive first impressions. While neither patients, visitors nor staff expect fancy flooring in a hospital, it should be at least clean, in good shape and in line with the company’s branding.

There is No One-Size-Fits-All Solution

When deciding on the best flooring for your facility, it’s important to remember that there is no single best solution. Flooring choices will vary depending on whether you provide primary care, urgent care or long-term care. Moreover, even within the same facility you may have to use several different floor coatings and coverings to meet the needs of a specific area.

At Dragon Scale Flooring, we’ve worked with numerous healthcare facilities to help select and install the right flooring solutions for their needs. In our arsenal, we have such flooring products as epoxy, polyurethane, polyaspartic coatings, elastomeric coatings, cementitious urethane and many others. Each of these products has its own pros and cons that make it ideal for specific healthcare applications.

Give us a call or contact online to talk to one of our flooring experts and get a professional advice and installation.