A cautionary tale about pivoting doors

When you were a child you were possibly told a tale about three little pigs. One built a house from straw and got eaten by the wolf. The second built a house from wood and met the same fate. The third pig was smart, built a brick house and made the wolf into a stew. It’s a grisly tale but it’s a handy way to illustrate a problem. In the healthcare sector, management is choosing products that are the equivalent of those straw houses. If they push the boat out and choose the timber house it still fails, and when it does, they build another wooden house.

Let’s look at a specific issue of bedroom doors in the mental health sector. They need to be solid to withstand potential abuse and to maintain a sympathetic aesthetic and feel, timber is the preferred material. The doors don’t come cheap. Typically, costs can vary between ￡300 and ￡600, but even so, the pivot mechanisms are a site of weakness and the timber is often split by service user abuse. With a damaged door, the room is out of action. Bed capacity in a stretched system is reduced, and funds that could be better spent on clinical care are allocated to replacing the door. And in a move that makes no sense to me, the same model of a product that has just failed is sourced and installed again.

This happens over and again, and the funds wasted are enormous. It’s not just the materials, it’s the maintenance costs and the time for which valuable facilities are unusable. I’m going to be blunt – daft purchasing decisions are impacting our ability to deliver mental health services. We keep choosing straw houses even though we know they’re not up to the job.

There are alternatives. About five or six years ago, I was called out to look at a 54mm fire door that had been broken not long after installation. Instead of starting again, I installed one of our patented pivot point protectors. I’ve recently seen that door again. It’s still getting abused – you can see signs of damage – but importantly it hasn’t failed, it’s still safe and it’s still doing its job. Because our design is patented, the only competition comes from counterfeited versions and these don’t begin to approach our standards. With a counterfeit pivot point protector in a new door, I’m certain that the door would have been replaced several times over the intervening years. The cost and the environmental impact would have been substantial.

I’m building a collection of images, examples and stories. The subject is failed products – ones that break under minimal strain or promise durability but don’t actually deliver it. This issue applies to pivot point protectors, bottom straps, pivots and vision panels amongst others. Often these aren’t bargain basement unbranded products. They are manufactured by some of the biggest names in door hardware and specialist suppliers to the mental healthcare sector. If I can see the design flaws that have led to failure, why can’t the manufacturers? Why aren’t they solving the problem? And why are customers still placing orders for items that let them down? It’s just not good enough.

For a long time, I’ve thought that some of the suppliers in the business don’t care about failure rates because the culture ensures a repeat order will be forthcoming. I’m also beginning to think that we’ve become excessively fond of maintenance tasks, and that failure is accepted as the norm, not something we should be thinking about and solving. I’m beginning to think that we don’t care about waste or the environment and are skipping the ‘repair’ option, jumping straight to ‘replace’. I’ve not – and probably never will – come to the conclusion that our health services have money to burn.

Going back to that tale we were told as children, building from straw or wood isn’t adequate. When there’s a challenging environment we need to use better materials. The pigs learned the hard way, but it seems to be a lesson many of us are struggling to take on board.

If you’d like to discuss the issues raised in this post, please get in touch.