When it comes to ensuring the safety of service users within behavioral health facilities, clinical teams face a range of unique challenges. One of the greatest risks faced is the potential for ligature attempts, with those involving the patient’s door specifically posing the biggest threat.
By considering the environment and a patient’s interaction with it, we can begin to reduce the risk factors present. In today’s blog article, we will be exploring how the use of a Door Top Monitor (DTM) can help achieve this.
At Kingsway Group, we exist to challenge thinking and drive innovation to move safety and design in behavioral health environments to the next level. Our design-led philosophy and ongoing collaboration with behavioral health clinical teams help us identify risk areas and set about creating solutions.
Through our mission for improved patient safety, we developed our complete ligature resistant door systems to help contribute to the healing environment through proven performance and elegant non-institutional aesthetics.
When paired with a carefully designed ligature-resistant doorset, such as the Kingsway SWING Anti-Barricade Door System, a Door Top Monitor can help prevent loss of life.
Our tested and proven DTM has been used successfully on clinical wards since we introduced it over five years ago. To accomplish this, we combined our years of design experience in behavioral health with learnings from our ongoing discussions and research with our healthcare partners, resulting in a DTM that can help provide heightened awareness of patient activity and improve staff response times to emergency incidents through ligature detection.
In keeping with the design ethos of our door systems to contribute to the healing environment, our DTM alarm is discreetly integrated within our door systems, allowing the monitor to function as intended without detracting from the aesthetics or performance of the door. Many traditional door top monitors fail to consider this, resulting in institutional appearances and less therapeutic environments for patients. Such DTMs, subsequently, can often be the target of tampering, leading to damaged or faulty DTMs and an increase in patient risk.
As a door top monitor forms part of a life-critical system within behavioral health facilities, it is imperative they be as reliable as possible. Due to this, our DTM is hard-wired by design and AC powered along with a back-up battery facility for emergency use in power outages.
The hard-wired feature of our DTM makes it more reliable than wireless alternatives, which utilize Wi-Fi to transmit alarms and can be prone to interference or suffer outages.
Furthermore, by utilizing a hard-wired system design, our door top monitor avoids the need to frequently replace batteries, a process that causes disruption on wards, as well as being time-consuming for staff and costly for behavioral health facilities.
As a partner in patient safety, we are proud to be helping reduce risk in behavioral health facilities by combining our tried and tested door systems with our innovative DTM. To find out more about how a Kingsway Group Door Top Monitor can benefit your facility, speak to a member of our team.
Key benefits of the Kingsway Door Top Monitor:
- Discreet integration with a proven ligature resistant door system
- Detects ligatures with door in both closed and open positions
- Non-institutional aesthetics that contribute to the healing environment
- Hardwired and AC powered for increased performance and reliability
- Not prone to interference from wireless devices
- Can run on back-up battery in event of AC power outage
- Alarm annunciation in event of ligature detection