As a medical facility manager, you want to provide an excellent patient experience and run a lean practice. Providing the best possible patient experience requires having the best possible healthcare storage solution for your facility. Proper medical shelving and storage make for safer, more organized and efficient healthcare processes. Top-notch organization is essential to ensuring your team has the necessary tools to do their jobs. (It also helps you save time, money and square footage!)
Thankfully, many types of shelving are available to transform your facility’s storage capacity and organization, make life easier for your practitioners and, most importantly, promote the best possible outcomes for your patients.
The Who, What, Where and How of Medical Shelving
Who needs medical shelving? Every medical facility, whether patient-facing or not, needs shelving and storage. However, each facility has unique needs and limitations regarding what they need to store, how they need to store those things, where they have the storage space and much more. Luckily, there are many solutions for a wide variety of facilities. And at Patterson Pope, we’ve helped large hospitals and healthcare systems — like the Cleveland Clinic and the Medical University of South Carolina — to smaller practices.
What can you store with medical shelving? We can help you store:
- Medical supplies, including gloves, single-use kits, IV tubing, sterile needles, etc.
- Sterile instruments
- Medications
- Lab equipment
- Large medical equipment, like machines and beds
- Samples for testing
Where do you need medical shelving? Some of the most common spaces where we install custom healthcare storage solutions include:
- Pharmacies, like clinical and retail pharmacies, which both need customizable and easily accessible storage
- Laboratories, which require sterile storage solutions and workspaces
- Sterile supply spaces for storing surgical tools and equipment in bulk
- Procedure rooms that require sterile yet easily accessible storage for individual tools, pre- and post-procedure cleaning
- Individual patient rooms, which require small storage stations equipped with vital supplies
- Patient floor, which may have multiple small storage stations
- Supply and utility storage rooms that store large quantities of tools, supplies, cleaners, bedding and medications
- Equipment storage rooms that store beds, wheelchairs, machines and more
How do you store? No matter what function your healthcare facility serves or how much space you have, many types of shelving and storage options exist to meet your needs. Some of the most common types of medical shelving and storage include:
- Bin Shelving: You can store the small stuff using a modular bin shelving system. These stationary shelves with open-face bins in varying sizes work exceptionally well in pharmacies to keep medications organized or sort out patient prescriptions.
- Patient Server: The CoreSTOR Patient Server compact storage unit allows you to create a well-stocked, full-service nurse’s station in every patient room or in spaces between the supply closet and the patient floor.
- Laminate Cabinets: Modular laminate cabinets allow you to build custom storage in your filing space, breakroom, supply storage room or patient room.
- Powder-Coated Steel Cabinets: The modular powder-coated steel cabinets work best in laboratories and procedure rooms. You can choose a combination of wall-mounted, tall, base and full storage cabinets.
- Stainless Steel Cabinets: Modular stainless steel cabinets provide sterile storage that you can change as your storage needs change. Glass-face cabinets make finding supplies quick. Also, stainless steel is resistant to harsh cleaning chemicals, so they stay in working condition for longer, making them perfect for laboratories and procedure rooms.
Medical Shelving Alternatives You Need to Know About
There are many dynamic solutions for storing small bulk supplies, patient care equipment, testing and diagnostic machines and other bulk items. Here are some other types of shelving systems you should consider for your healthcare facility:
Hospital Bed Storage:
Hospital beds are some of the largest pieces of equipment your facility has. When the beds aren’t in use, you need a place to put them that won’t take up valuable workspace for your team and new patients. A dedicated hospital bed storage area can resolve a few key issues:
- Safety hazards: Hallways can get crowded with empty hospital beds that block traffic through the corridor. This can slow your team members down, lead to injuries and hinder compliance with evacuation safety.
- Cleanliness: Beds left out collect dust, germs and other particles that can hinder patient recovery or cause additional issues. Beds may need more disinfecting when left out.
- Inventory management: When properly stowed away, your team knows where to find a bed when they need it.
- Inventory maintenance: A dedicated storage system can promote effective equipment inspection to identify faulty, broken or depleted bed equipment. When stored away correctly, beds are also less likely to incur damage.
- Inventory turnover: When better inspecting and maintaining beds, your facility can save money on replacing them less often.
A bed lift provides a centralized storage space for unused hospital beds. You can store multiple stacked beds in a single bay but easily access them when needed. We helped AnMed Health find a bed lift solution to store extra beds in a five-high vertical storage system with tech-assisted retrieval that improved efficiency, reduced equipment damage and made retrieving beds safer for staff.
Wheelchair Storage
Like beds, wheelchairs are often left in corridors, rooms, closets and other spaces where they are more likely to get damaged or take up space. Foldable wheelchairs may be easier to store because they’re more compact. Powered wheelchairs, on the other hand, can be quite a storage challenge.
Create a designated wheelchair storage space that promotes organization, makes equipment management easier and prevents safety hazards from wheelchairs left in public areas. For example, you can get wheelchair racks that store powered wheelchairs (and keep them charged!) and wall-mounted racks to store multiple foldable wheelchairs. Retrieval is simple and safe — press the up-down button to move chairs in and out of the rack to the ground.
Rotomat
The Rotomat is a storage carousel with a vertical “Ferris wheel” structure to rotate storage shelves to retrieval level. It’s a compact solution for storing many items in a single cabinet. It also uses automation technology and app integrations that you can customize for whatever you’re storing and retrieving.
The Rotomat can serve a few different functions in a medical facility:
- Supply storage: You can store medical supplies, tools, equipment, medications and more away from dust, light and theft. You can give each item its own section or shelf and efficiently retrieve what you need with the press of a button.
- File storage: While patient data goes into the cloud, most facilities still keep paper trails for patients, testing, research, financial management and more.
No matter how big or small your available storage space is, there’s an innovative solution for you. We helped NCH Healthcare maximize the capacity of a 420-square-foot backup supply room with a Rotomat instead of high-density shelving. We also helped Florida Hospital Wesley Chapel, a growing facility without a lot of room, optimize its space to create more procedure rooms. We used a combination of high-density storage and three Rotomats to make it happen.
Does Your Medical Shelving Need an Upgrade?
High-quality patient care requires skilled practitioners and an organized storage system for supplies and equipment can keep everyone at the top of their game. Here are some challenges that proper medical shelving and storage can address in your facility:
- Accessibility issues with retrieving supplies and equipment
- High equipment turnover or frequent reports of damage
- Missing or misplaced equipment
- A lack of dedicated, practical storage space for large or small items
- Issues with cleanliness, sterility and/or hospital-acquired infections
- Crowded corridors or storage overflow
- Frequent changes in your facility’s storage needs
The Right Medical Shelving Solution for Your Facility Can Make You Better
When your equipment, tools, supplies and medications are stored neatly in their proper place, your team can more efficiently get what they need and get back to their patients. Each process in your facility is also streamlined and made more uniform, increasing efficiency and even making training new team members much more straightforward.
Proper storage also maximizes your facility’s walking space, work space and storage space. That means a safer environment for staff, patients and visitors. It can also increase treatment capacity and create a more comfortable setting for recovery. Lastly, it helps your facility meet compliance and regulatory requirements for fire safety, patient transportation, equipment and medication storage and more.
You know how to keep things moving on the patient floor, in the pharmacy or around the lab. Patterson Pope knows how to store the stuff you need to save lives. Contact a storage expert to find the right solution for your healthcare facility.
