The bed space is a crucial location. The area in the immediate surroundings of the patients’ bed, and the bed itself, are crucial to safety and efficiency yet design advances have been almost non-existent for longer than we can remember.

Now, designers are working with clinical specialists to improve the experience and outcome of patient care, to reduce infection rates, and to improve general safety and efficiency. The Department of Health has placed vast sums of money into the hands of a number of research groups while the commercial sector have joined in to produce ever more elaborate, and often over-engineered, ‘solutions’ to problems that might be managed by more basic approaches to the delivery of care.

In an interesting piece on BBC News of the Hunterian Museum (RCS) exhibition ‘Designing Out Medical Error’.

It’s all good stuff, though some might really be way over the top. An example of this is the magic waste bin design that opens it’s lid thanks to a proximity sensor and the wave of a hand.

Presumably requiring a power supply, or a battery that may run flat at the most inconvenient moment and take days to replace (!), the BBC film item shows exactly how well it works. Unfortunately, we know full well that existing pedal bins are also entirely hands free yet this does not stop users touching the lid. The investment of generous sums of money to research groups to redesign this particular wheel while failing entirely to solve the fundamental problem should be obvious to all but still the money flows down this particular drain!

And why, while we’re at it, is a pair of latex gloves discarded into the black bin shown in the film clip?