Furnishing a correctional or behavioural healthcare facility is unlike any other building. Prioritizing the health and well-being of vulnerable populations presents unique challenges, and the surroundings these populations are placed in can have a large impact on their moods and behaviors.
Although seemingly simple, choosing the institutional furniture for your facility can have a large impact on residents, staff, and visitors! From keeping residents safe to lowering maintenance costs, here are the best pieces of institutional furniture for every room in your facility.
Most often, resident rooms tend to have less supervision, posing a challenge for staff members to ensure resident safety remains a top priority at all times. Additionally, as resident rooms are a space to promote rest and decompress, they must remain a comfortable, normalized living space.
Every piece of furniture in a resident room must be anti-ligature, meaning there are no tie down points that can be used to cause harm to oneself or others, and there are no exceptions for the feature piece of furniture, beds!
An anti-ligature bed with rounded corners and in a nature inspired color is not only the safest piece of anti-ligature furniture for a resident room, but also promotes a good night’s sleep. Institutional furniture with a softer look can help residents feel more at ease in what could be a stressful environment. Additionally, providing a bed with storage options allows residents a personal space store their belongings, adding a sense of normalcy to their life.
By providing residents with a space of their own for reading or writing, you can promote a rehabilitative environment in your facility. A desk and stool is an excellent addition of anti-ligature furniture to your facility’s resident rooms, promoting a positive use of free time. Working to improve the mental wellness of residents is a step in the right direction in order to promote rehabilitation.
The day rooms, or common areas, in your facility play an important role as they provide a space for residents and visitors to interact. The furnishing you chose for the common rooms in your facility should work to promote healthy and positive interactions between residents.
The addition of a games table in your facility makes the common areas feel more like living spaces rather than institutional spaces. The variety of board games available to play on a games table promotes residents to interact with one another in a structured and healthy way, furthering the rehabilitative atmosphere in your facility as well as normalizing the environment.
An armchair adds a higher level of comfort and normalcy to common spaces, opposed to more traditional pieces of correctional facility furniture. Adding this comfortable piece of anti-ligature furniture helps residents to feel more at ease in common spaces where they are more likely to be interacting with others.
As another common area in your facility, the institutional furniture in dining rooms should support comfortable interactions between residents.
An extended dining table allows for more residents to enjoy a meal together. This promotes social interactions which feel more normalized, compared to the traditional institutional feel of many correctional and behavioral healthcare facilities. Additionally, the social interactions supported by an extended dining table allows residents to feel less alone in what can be a somewhat isolating environment.
Armless chairs are an ideal piece of institutional furniture for dining rooms, as they take up less space, while still remaining comfortable and inviting. Their compact size allows for more residents to gather around the dining table and take part in positive interactions.
Each room in your facility presents a unique opportunity to best support residents, simply by the anti-ligature furniture chosen!
Max-Secure has been working with industry experts for more than 40 years to provide institutional furniture that is extremely durable, comfortable, and totally safe to correctional and behavioral healthcare facilities around the world. Our complete line of anti-ligature furniture ensures you can find safe, comfortable furnishings for every room in your facility!
