Alder Hey Children’s Hospital and Axis Flo-Motion® Doors

At the new Alder Hey Children’s Health Park three quarters of patients will be in single rooms rather Nightingale wards. The importance of light and airiness was vital to the whole design concept and this meant the doors for each of the patient’s rooms had to be large for ease of access for beds and equipment, glazed for brightness and airiness, have privacy blinds for examinations or just occasional solitude, and finally they had to be easily opened and closed - by a child.

After an extensive search, only one company came up with an effective, practical solution and that was Axis Automatic Entrance Systems. Doors up to 1800mm wide and 2700mm high are not that excessive, even for glazed doors. However, the Venetian blinds had to be integrated into the doors for infection control and to avoid expensive cleaning and maintenance.

So these were fitted between two panes of glass with magnetic controls to avoid an “infection bridge” into the glazing gap. That just left the problem of opening and closing with some of the doors now weighing up to 160kg each. At this point Axis turned to Accuride International and together they developed the sliding mechanism for what has become the Axis Flo-Motion® Door System.

Using re-circulating ball guides on a special low resistance linear track, the doors slide so easily that an ingenious damper had to be designed to absorb the energy of the heavy doors so they did not slam into the end of the track.

Each sliding door is operated with minimal effort using fingertip control on back to back nylon handles. A maximum of 22N had been specified as the maximum opening or closing force required and actual testing of the doors in situ showed them all to be well under that figure with many nearer 10N. An astonishing performance for doors of this size and weight.