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Seating Makes a Difference in Healthcare
By Roger K. Leib, AIA

ADD has always been known for doing one thing especially well: making seating that makes a big difference to people using them. While our employees now take for granted the regular calls from recently discharged patients or visitors inquiring how they can get chairs, all of us take pride in sharing the often touching letters and stories that invariably accompany these requests.

Here are a few examples that come to mind:

A Rose Chair was placed in a nursing home for evaluation. A man who hadn't spoken or uttered a sound for 2 years was given the chair to use. Nurses report that by the end of the first day he began whistling. They suggest that perhaps it was just his time to whistle. Or more likely, that for the first time in 2 years, he was comfortable.

And speaking of dramatic recoveries, a one-time nurse who heads up the healthcare division of a Steelcase dealership tells the story of her husband, then a patient in Mayo Clinic and going downhill quickly. Seeing that he was accumulating upper-respiratory fluids, she went frantically searching throughout the facility for a rocker, which she thought would help him mobilize (cough up) these fluids and clear his lungs. Thinking traditional rockers unsafe for patient use, Mayo prohibited them. As luck would have it, however, this former nurse happened to locate a Warren Chair that was being demo-ed in the facility. She had it brought into her husband's room, and reports that his recovery after that point was "miraculous". She has thanked us for saving his life

The sales trainer at Relax The Back, a nation-wide chain of 100+ stores devoted to back comfort, had become so excited about the curative benefits of these chairs that she began advising salespeople to tell customers with back problems that they could "buy a chair now, or wait 'til they ended up in one [in the hospital]".

One Relax the Back store owner in Florida told us about a well-known back surgeon vacationing in Florida who came into the store, "discovered" ADD's Warren De-Stressors, began raving that in his 27 years as a surgeon he'd never seen anything as good for backs, and bought 10 of them for his waiting room.

Two separate reps report having brought demo chairs in for potential psychiatric applications. In both instances, staff was trying to manage patients who had become highly agitated in response to a sedative they'd been given, so staff was unable to sedate them further. In both instances, the patients were coaxed into ADD chairs and were asleep within 12 minutes. The amazed staff labeled this "non-pharmacological sedation"!

We hear repeatedly how difficult it is for reps to get demo chairs back. A Rose Chair was placed for evaluation into a large Midwestern hospital. It made its way for a short period into a bone marrow transplant room. When it came time to move it elsewhere for evaluation, the patient refused to let it be moved (we hear this one all the time). But in this case, he let administration know that the chair was going nowhere, even if he had to buy it, telling them "it was the first humane thing that had happened to him since he entered the hospital". The hospital subsequently standardized on the chair.

Stories like this must seem unusual to people used to designing corporate offices or hotels. For us, they are the unique rewards of the healthcare market with its myriad and specialized needs.

Roger Leib is Vice President of Healthcare Product Design for KI. He can be reached at roger_leib@ki-inc.com.