Door Surfaces, Edges and Cores in Healthcare Projects
When designing a new healthcare building, two of the client’s biggest concerns are durability and hygiene. Interior healthcare doors, used by so many people so frequently day and night, need to meet high standards. The door surface type, edges, and core all affect the doors’ ability to stand up to the challenge. Take a look at the key features to consider when specifying interior healthcare doors.
Hospitals are a Unique Design Environment
Hospitals and healthcare facilities have a major responsibility to keep patients, visitors, and healthcare professionals safe. They must be built for high capacity and busy movement, complete with bulky equipment like carts and gurneys. Doors facilitate this movement, letting professionals do their jobs successfully. They can even contribute directly to people’s health.
Healthcare doors must be durable, but not too heavy. They should be easy to clean, easy to open, and in certain situations, reduce sound transfer. Their construction and features should take these goals into account.
Healthcare Door Surfaces
A key factor when specifying healthcare doors is choosing the right door surface. While you might choose a wood veneer for a few key places, such as executive offices, laminates usually perform best in hallways, patient rooms, and other busy areas. A high-impact laminate stands up to daily abuse while creating visual consistency throughout the building.
A high-impact laminate door surface is made by bonding half-inch thick sheets of resin to the core under pressure and heat. This process can work with a variety of different door cores. Inorganic materials, like high pressure decorative laminates (HPDL), eliminate miniscule crevices that you might find in wood, which can harbor germs. Laminates provide smooth, easy-to-clean surfaces for doors that are used frequently and touched by many people.
Masonite Architectural offers high impact laminates in a wide range of wood grain patterns, solid colors, and decorative designs, as well as custom colors.
Healthcare Door Edges
An interior door’s edges have implications for both durability and cleanliness. First, a door is only as durable as its edges. Impact edges increase a hospital door’s durability, helping it stand up to frequent use and collisions with equipment. A wood door with impact edges can withstand impact from carts, wheelchairs or gurneys, as well as frequent hard closings, without metal edges.
Clean edges create a more hygienic product by eliminating areas where germs would otherwise get trapped. Clean-edge doors minimize bacterial growth and allow easy cleaning for infection prevention and control.
Masonite Architectural makes impact edge doors in a wide range of solid colors and woodgrains, which can look uniform with wood veneer doors or millwork. They adhere to superior industry standards, complete with smooth vertical edges that can be easily wiped down.
Healthcare Door Cores and Performance Features
Door cores can fulfill several different needs for healthcare interior doors, including fire rating, radiation protection, and noise reduction.
Fire-rated doors are required in healthcare settings and contribute to safer environments. Fire-rated door cores, or mineral cores, are made from non-combustible materials such as minerals and fiberglass. They can be found in 20-, 45- or 90-minute fire rated doors designed to slow the spread of fire and smoke from one room to the next.
Lead-lined doors are required for rooms containing x-ray machines and other imaging equipment. A lead-lined door contains a sheet of lead that is 1/32″, 1/16″, or 1/8″ thick, situated inside a mineral or wood core. The lead lining shields patients and medical providers from radiation. Lead-lined healthcare doors can also come fire-rated for 45 or 60 minutes.
Acoustics play an important role in a healthcare setting. Noise reduction improves patient privacy and enhances recovery from illness or surgery. An STC-rated wood door can reduce noise from voices, hallway traffic, ringing phones, and medical equipment. Acoustic doors depend on a core that dampens sound, along with a surface, frame, gasketing, and hardware that all work together. To get an accurate measure of sound transfer, Masonite Architectural tests our acoustic doors as part of a complete assembly.
Shape Better Healthcare Environments with Masonite Architectural Doors
Healthcare is one of the industries where Masonite Architectural focuses for providing complete door solutions. The next time you are ready to specify doors for a healthcare or hospital project, explore our options to meet all of the interior door demands of your design. Contact your representative or order samples now.