has anyone any experience of bariatric design in extre care housing ?

Hi Angie, yes, I'm a Housing Occupational Therapist and have had some involvement with designing for bariatric clients.
What exactly do you need to know?
There are no national guidelines and so my research was mainly focussed on design standards for US medical facilities.
Sadly, sooner or later there will be a need for a care environment for many bariatric clients/tenants so it makes sense to take this is a guidance.
Issues we experience are: access to properties as door widths for wheelchair properties are often not enough, problems with any properties above the ground floor due to combined client weight, family members (often also bariatric), equipment, dynamic loading etc.
Bathroom-a whole chapter in itself.
Please let me know what info you are looking for and I can give you some more pointers.

Hi Sonia,

I am working on developing some extra care settings in Torbay and we would also like to design a number of bariatric dwellings as part of these sites. Could you point me towards any resources or materials you found useful please?

Hi Patrick,

Thanks for your email.
I just wrote my own.
Have a look and see if you find it useful.
The other document is from training I attended years ago, it did not offer that much in terms of designing from scratch.
I found that it can be tricky to convince the commissioners of the need for these spaces as there is quite a lot of stigma attached and they want to create as many units as possible and the units have to be much larger, especially with care needs.

Would be nice to stay in touch.

Kind regards,

Sonia

Hi Sonia,

I am lucky in that the commissioners I work with are very aware of the current and future issues around bariatric care, the increasing prevalence and need for settings to be more suited to the equipment and patient care requirements.

There are some really useful bits of information in the document you provided which I wouldn't have thought of before reading through this so thank you very much for sharing! I will try and share some of the information / building requirements that I generate as part of my project as well in the hopes that it will help others in similar situations.

Kind regards,

Patrick

For information for anyone following this thread, one of my colleagues have pointed me to this document which s really useful.