Design Guide
A new edition of the Behavioral Health Design Guide has been published and is available for download, Design Guide January 2022.
This edition marks the 25th revision of this whitepaper that was originally posted in 2003.
The Design Guide is available free of cost via download as a service to the industry in an attempt to provide current information regarding products and philosophies that we feel are better for use in psychiatric hospitals and behavioral health facilities.
Check our Products page for products released since the publication of the current edition of the Design Guide.
Kimberly McMurray and Jim Hunt have the privilege of donation of our time and sharing the duties of authoring this document with David Sine, the president of Safety Logic Systems. It is a compilation of our combined more than one-hundred years of experience in designing, facility management and risk management and operation of these facilities. We are also aided by many individuals active in the field with their comments regarding what does (and doesn’t) enhance patient and staff safety in these facilities.
In 2019, the 9th edition included extensive revisions to the Construction and Materials Considerations which now provides a Baseline considerations section that establishes the authors’ understanding of the basic requirements for inpatient adult behavioral health facilities. The individual sections for the various risk levels then explain how these considerations for each risk level need to vary from the Baseline. This format will allow expansion of this paper to include other types of patient populations, as well as emergency department considerations in future editions. This expansion has been requested by many readers over the years and we look forward to being able to include those types of facilities as we continue to try to make this document more useful to its readers.
Readers viewing this electronically may now simply click on an item in the Table of Contents or Appendix Index and be taken immediately to that location. Product and preference website addresses are also interactive in that clicking on them will take readers directly to the selected company’s website.
If you have any technical issues downloading the design guide, please notify us by using the “Contact Us” page to explain your issue and provide us your contact information for our reply, or contact Kimberly McMurray directly at kimberly@bhfcllc.com. Thank you!
