Heartlands Hospital & LCN Door Closers - A Long Lasting Relationship
16/02/2009

Heartlands Hospital in Birmingham has just carried out a fire safety upgrade on the doors in the Outpatients Department. This involved upgrading some doors to FD30S fire doors by either fitting completely new door and frame sets or, in some cases the simple addition of smoke seals and a fire rated door closer such as the LCN Sentronic Multi Point ‘hold open’ closer. Nothing particularly unusual in their choice of door closers except that, since the mid 1990s, Heartlands have had a policy to fit nothing but LCN Door Closers.

When Project Manager Robert Davey joined their Operations Team in 1994, one of the first challenges he had to deal with was a new maternity block where the architects had specified a variety of door closers based almost exclusively on cost. Within 3 months virtually all had failed through leaking seals and similar faults. They were all replaced by the manufacturer (and at their expense) but, 3 months later they had all failed again. This time the hospital decided to pay for the replacements and to make their own choice of closer. Relying heavily on past experience, Robert opted for LCNs and most of those same closers are still in operation today.

In 1995 the hospital reviewed all their door and ironmongery specifications as a regular new building programme had resulted in a vast range of different specifications used from a wide number of manufacturers. This meant it was totally impractical for the maintenance department to stock a full range of spares to enable them to provide a fast and efficient repair and maintenance service. Virtually every requirement had to be ordered from the manufacturer and long delays were far too frequent.

So standard specs were drawn up and Ingersoll Rand’s range of LCN door closers were chosen as the only approved option. Distributed by Relcross in the UK, LCN closers have been keeping the doors of Heartlands Hospital under control ever since. Robert Davey said “The beauty of LCN closers is that they are truly fit and forget. After any initial adjustments are made we get no more problems. The irony is we now stock a pretty comprehensive range of spare parts but rarely ever need to use them.”
The Heart of England NHS Trust includes Birmingham Heartlands Hospital, Solihull Hospital, Good Hope Hospital and Birmingham Chest Clinic and is one of the highest performing in the UK, voted Acute Trust of the Year in the 2006 Health Service Journal Awards and in the Nursing Times' Top 10 Places to Work in 2005. It provides nearly 2000 beds and serves over a million people throughout north and east Birmingham, Solihull, Sutton Coldfield, Tamworth, Burntwood and the surrounding areas.

The main site at Bordesley Green covers 38.5 acres (or about 15.6 hectares) and provides 900 beds. Overall the Trust employs over 10,000 staff and the Operations Team is responsible for more than 200,000 square metres of building space - that’s well over 2,000,000 square feet.

For the recent Outpatients upgrade Relcross supplied local Architectural Ironmongers BM Ltd with 16 LCN Sentronic 4040SE Single Point Hold Open Door Closers, 9 LCN 4313ME Multi Point Hold Open Door Closers and 13 LCN 1460DA Door Closers. These were then purchased by Heartlands contractor, N E Cox, of Boldmore, Sutton Coldfield, who carried out the installation.

Relcross Sales & Marketing Director Stuart McMaster said “It’s tempting to cut corners on door hardware when economic times are tough but Heartlands Hospital know from experience that this is a false economy and have been one of our loyal customers for many years.”

> News story list