Photo by David Martin, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
In the early eighties and nineties, we specialised exclusively in the design and supply of heavy-duty wall beds and were busy pioneering their use for accommodating patients’ family members overnight in Hospitals and Hospices.
Southampton General Hospital were already an early wall bed customer, as we had supplied our wall beds for their Piam Brown, Paediatric Oncology and other Wards.
By the early/mid1990s, we had developed and launched our award winning new range of wall-fixed ‘WISKAWAY’® Hospital and Hospice Visitor Wallbeds and now turned our attention to the mobile Hospital and Hospice visitor guest bed market, where the products available were nearly all non-compliant and totally unsuitable, being either cheap, flimsy ‘domestic’ beds, which lasted just a few weeks/months in service, or bulky heavy-duty ‘contract’ beds, designed primarily for hotel use, which were mostly heavy/awkward to handle and wasted a lot of Ward space, during the day.
At exactly this time, we were approached by one of the Paediatric Wards (G4) at Southampton General Hospital, who were using some of our older free-standing ‘Horizontal’ wall beds and were looking for some new mobile parents’ beds.
We provided them with two alternatives to try-out: a ‘Horizontal’ wall bed on wheels and a completely new, fully compliant, compact, easy-to-handle, but heavy-duty guest bed design with a really comfortable wipe-clean/waterproof mattress, which we christened the ‘GLIDEAWAY’® VISITOR GUESTBED, on account of the way it could be moved around effortlessly on its 4 Hospital wheels -(see pictures below).
The two sample beds were trialled/compared on the Ward, over a number of months, following which the new ‘GLIDEAWAY’® was chosen AND THE REST IS HISTORY!
The ‘GLIDEAWAY’® rapidly took the Hospital and Hospice guest bed market ‘by storm’ and established itself as the guest bed of choice, not only at Southampton General Hospital, who are currently one of our biggest ‘GLIDEAWAY’® customers, but also in Hospitals and Hospices all over the Country.
In addition to being one of our biggest ‘GLIDEAWAY’® Visitor Guestbed customers, Southampton General Hospital have periodically purchased ‘WISKAWAY’® Visitor Wallbeds, as and when various Wards were refurbished.
The Wards in question include the refurbished Piam Brown Ward, Ward E1, Ward G6 and more recently (2023/24) Ward G3 and Ward G2 Neuro -(see pictures below).
In 2024 we also supplied some of our ‘Vertical’ 7500H ‘WISKAWAY’® Visitor Wallbeds, complete with matching lockers 7600H with digital locks, for the Neonatal Unit on the next-door Princess Anne Maternity Hospital – another member of the Southampton Hospitals Group.
