subject: Transport Chair | Wheelchair Products Make The Wheels Go Round [print this page] . But before a company avails itself of these terrific products, it must open its mind to the idea of a completely different kind of wheelchair.
More a Patient Transport System than a Wheelchair
This alternative transport chair serves the same function as a wheelchair. It rolls, is pushed by another person, and can be used to get a patient, customer, or client from one place to another. However, this particular model and its attendant wheelchair products were designed specifically for institutional use, rather for the individual.
This is because there are generally different levels of needs between the two. Individually used chairs are designed to support the independence of their occupants and often customized to accommodate any attendant physical issues that come along with long-term mobility impairment.
Transport chairs in facilities such as hospitals and airports have a somewhat different function. This is because the independent movement of the chair's occupant can lead to injury, liability, loss of the chair or some combination of these or other problems. In other words, enlightened self-interest tends to require that the chair not be independently propelled by its occupant.
Products that Avoid Theft or Injury
This alternative transport is designed so that it can only be moved by an attendant, but that is where it starts, not stops. One of the wheelchair products that help to safeguard both client and product is the nesting stand.
These chairs are built in such a way that they can be nested against one another like shopping carts. This concomitantly reduces the ability to be folded up and put in a car, but at the same time actually saves storage space with the nesting stand.
This stand can be purchased in several sizes, takes up very little room in a hall - making the chairs easy to store and find and very hard to trip over or tip over - and can be locked or fitted with a coin-return mechanism, depending on how they are to be used.
Other Nifty Features of a Stackable Wheelchair
These chairs are also designed with permanently fixed but moveable arm and footrests. This makes for vastly easier loading and unloading, without the risk of something falling off and becoming lost or a safety hazard.
There are removable products such as oxygen tank and infusion pump holders, cushions and seatbelts just to name a few. The cushions are washable and bacteria resistant, as are all parts of the chairs themselves.
The ability to thoroughly clean a chair without worrying about mold, mildew, or rust is a must in this day and age of swine flu and antibiotic resistant infections. Standard wheelchairs are very often not up to meeting this need without the risk of product failure.
While it isn't really a wheelchair product as such, or a loss-prevention feature like a traceable serial number, which these alternative transport chairs also come with, there is one more really neat aspect. They come in several standard colors and can even be customized. While this may not be strictly vital, it certainly adds to the image any facility presents.
