Photo by Lewis Clarke, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Having pioneered the use of wall beds to accommodate visitors in Hospital/Hospices throughout the 1980’s and early 1990’s, our transformational, high performance ‘WISKAWAY’® Visitor Wallbeds were the obvious choice for the parents’ beds at the brand new Bristol Royal Hospital for Children (BRHC), which opened its doors in 2001 and where we installed over 120 ‘WISKAWAY’® Parents’ Wallbeds (mainly ‘Vertical’ 7500H, but also some ‘Horizontal’ 6000H) spread across numerous Wards and over several floors.
BRHC was the first of many new dedicated Children’s Hospitals to specify our high performance ‘WISKAWAY’ Parents’ Wallbeds extensively and were the launch customer for our unique new sideways folding ‘Horizontal’ ‘WISKAWAY’ 6000R ‘Radiator’ Wallbed, (see plan view diagram), of which several were supplied, to fit in front of radiators, whilst still allowing access to the radiator behind for maintenance and thereby making use of what would otherwise have been unusable wall space.
[The nearby Royal United Hospital in Bath, where we installed our ‘WISKAWAY’® Visitor Wallbeds on the new Children’s Ward, shortly after the Bristol project, also purchased several of these ‘WISKAWAY’® 6000R Radiator Wallbeds].
In 2007 a completely new Ward (38) was added, for which a further quantity of standard ‘Horizontal’ 6000H ‘WISKAWAY’ Wallbeds were supplied and installed (see pictures below). The shape and layout of these new rooms is similar to that found in a number of other new Hospital buildings, also using our wall beds, including many at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London and those at the Great North Children’s Hospital in Newcastle and is why we offer ‘Horizontal’, as well as ‘Vertical’ wall beds.
Over the intervening years a substantial number of ‘GLIDEAWAY’ Visitor Guestbeds were also acquired, for use in areas with insufficient unencumbered wall space for a wall bed, including the multi-bedded bays of the new Ward 38.
BRHC also use an older single version of our ‘NEAT-A-WARD’® Patient Wallbed on their Teenage Cancer Trust Unit and several of our heavy-duty static bunk beds in some of their family rooms.
In 2018 BRHC informed us that the original wall beds we had supplied, 17 years previously in 2001, were ‘broken’ and put forward a plan to replace them over a phased 4 year period. This didn’t sound at all right to us and, on further investigation, it transpired that, whilst several of the beds did need some repairs after 17 years of continuous daily use, most just needed a full service.
Far from taking 4 years, the repairwork/servicing was completed in just a few weeks in 2019 and encompassed all the ‘WISKAWAY’® Parents Wallbeds and all the ‘GLIDEAWAY’® Parents Guestbeds in the Hospital. The original wall bed mattresses were also replaced, with our wipe-clean/waterproof ‘FLEXICA’® Mattresses, with replaceable covers and this was all financed by the Hospital’s own Wallace and Gromit Grand Appeal Charity.
At the end of the repair/servicing work the parents’ beds were all left working ‘as new’ and not a single one had had to be replaced – a fitting tribute to the quality and resilience of our World Class, high performance visitor wall beds and guest beds, most of which had endured 17 years of continuous daily use, without ever having been serviced!
This is why we refer to our Hospital and Hospice Visitor beds as ‘high performance’!
This example also brought home the absolutely massive cost savings achieved as a result of NOT having to replace the original parents’ beds from 2001, which are still in daily use at BRHC in 2025.
In 2019 we were asked to provide a number of extra second generation ‘Vertical’ ‘WISKAWAY’® 7500H Parents’ Wallbeds for the new High Dependency Unit, at BRHC.
