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Platform Lift Replacement in Jarrow
Of the hundreds of small care homes in the UK, many will have two or more floors and are required by law to have a passenger lift to enable residents and visitors with mobility issues to have easy and safe access to upper floors. This law dates to the introduction of the Disability Discrimination Act, which came into force in 1995, followed later by the Machinery Directive 2006/42/EC. This standard related to what the HSE requires of a platform lift, irrespective of what it is conveying. So, for many long-established care homes, a functional and safe platform lift installed before 2006 – and subsequently not modernised – is unlikely to be compliant with today’s standards.
This was exactly the case for a long-established 24-hour care home for twenty-three residents in Jarrow. The home had only one very small one-person lift, and the management team wanted a more up-to-date and fully compliant passenger lift for its residents. This resulted in a call to the Jackson Newcastle office to obtain an estimate for a replacement lift, along with the removal of the existing lift and a proposed time frame for the work.
The first task of our local Sales Engineer was to visit the care home and undertake a site survey to establish if the existing lift had a pit for the lift car to park in and if there was any additional need for building works, as the new lift will be both wider and deeper.
With the survey undertaken, we submitted our estimate for the care home management to consider. Shortly after submission, we are delighted to hear from the care home that our estimate and time frames were accepted, building works were not required, and we were given full approval to schedule the work.
The project required our local engineering team working from our Newcastle offices to remove the old lift and install a new, fully enclosed one stop screw driven platform lift that was fully compliant with the Machinery Directive 2006/42/EC. As the lift replacement required our local team to work in a fully occupied care home, we worked closely with the on-site management team to reduce resident disruption and inconvenience to a minimum level.
On completion, we fully tested the new platform lift and placed it into service for the residents. Our engineers also removed all the old redundant platform lift equipment from the site, splitting it into recyclable and non-recyclable equipment prior to disposal.