Phil Wade, director of Marketing at Static Systems Group, looks back at how bedhead services and trunking have developed over the past 40 years. Their development has, he says, been driven not only by increasingly stringent infection control criteria, the need for more attractive aesthetics, increased functionality, evolving communications technology, and the ability to adapt to meet changing needs, but equally by the growing part that clinicians and healthcare planners now play in the decision-making process for bedside layouts. He also looks forward to what we might expect to see in the future.
My intention in this article is to summarise the development of bedhead services provision during the last four decades, and to record how things have changed, and why. I will also attempt to describe how changing practices, technology, and government initiatives, have shaped the whole process, and what the future may hold in terms of change.
Early days
It is easy, with the wonderful benefit of hindsight, to look back at the earliest example of bedhead trunking and wonder how this could have been so significant. And yet, hiding within those uninspiring, square, ‘boxy looking’, and functional trunking units – as we would judge them today – was the germ of an idea that would evolve and radically change the face of bedhead services delivery for decades to come.
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