Why Use Custom Lab Furniture in a Clinical or Medical Laboratory?
We take a look at the reasons why leading Formaspace laboratory customers, like Quest Diagnostics, Antech Diagnostics, and Ariosa Diagnostics, as well as hospital systems like Baylor Scott & White, choose custom Formaspace integrated laboratory furniture to create highly efficient, accurate and safe lab working environments.
In contrast to small scientific laboratories (designed for individual teams of researchers), the needs of large, centralized laboratories are decidedly different.
While successful experimentation and discovery might be the primary objective in a research laboratory, in a large centralized laboratory environment, there are three watchwords that measure operational success: efficiency, accuracy, and safety.
- Efficiency means the ability to process a large throughput of test samples.
- Accuracy means the test results are correct, consistently repeatable, and as error-free as humanly possible.
- Safety means that personnel are not exposed in any way to unhealthy conditions or suffer workplace accidents.
What’s the best way to obtain these high-performance objectives at your facility?
From our experience in working hands-on with hundreds of laboratory clients, ranging from Quest Diagnostics, Antech Diagnostics, and Ariosa Diagnostics, as well as hospital systems like Baylor Scott & White, we think the following five guidelines are the basis of achieving success:
1. Create order out of chaos at your clinical hospital or medical laboratory with Integrated Lab Services from Formaspace.
High-throughput clinical laboratories, by their nature, tend to be very capital intensive.
Laboratory testing companies, healthcare organizations, and government agencies are investing millions of dollars in equipment to automate the processing of test samples.
Compared test equipment found in small-scale labs, individual pieces of laboratory equipment in centralized clinical or medical laboratories tends to see much more use throughout the day; in some cases, laboratory workers will use the equipment in multiple shifts around the clock to keep up with demand.
As a result, the laboratory layout and furniture design need to have provisions to facilitate both regular and unexpected maintenance outages. To maintain productivity, maintenance technicians and engineers need to be able to access equipment, either by quickly removing it and replacing it with a spare unit or by performing maintenance service in situ — without disrupting or shutting down other parts of the laboratory.
Here is where things can get complicated.
Often, this specialized equipment has to be protected from vibration or exposure to chemicals — yet at the same time, it needs to have an efficient and maintenance-friendly way to connect with the lab utilities — ranging from conditioned power, oxygen or other specialized gas lines, to water, to waste stacks, to ventilation systems (such as negative pressure fume hoods or even full-scale clean rooms).
That’s why Formaspace, working in conjunction with leading laboratory customers, has developed a solution we call Integrated Lab Services.
The Integrated Lab Services option — unlike other conventional workbench designs — features built-in quick connect utility connections in the back of each piece of furniture, as well as optional provisions for vibration reduction, chemical resistance, and static shock discharge protection — making them the ideal solution for high-throughput laboratories in standalone clinical labs, hospital environments or other healthcare and medical settings.
2. Don’t risk damage to expensive laboratory equipment. Use professional strength furniture and mobile transport solutions.
While the overall trend for laboratory test equipment is to become smaller year on year, the sheer volume of testing involved at large, centralized laboratories means that their testing equipment tends to be larger and heavier than what you would find in a typical research lab.
In fact, you could say that some of today’s large-scale laboratory equipment more closely resembles the type of equipment you would see in industrial-scale manufacturing facilities — another market sector for which Formaspace is well-known, with clients ranging from Boeing to Ford Motor Company to Toyota.
Here we leverage our experience in industrial-grade materials handling expertise — in other words, handling heavy objects safely and securely is something in which we have great experience.
You can have confidence in all Formaspace laboratory furniture: Each of our furniture products are designed to carry a minimum of 1,000 pounds of evenly distributed loads — which can offer you great peace of mind when you are using or transporting laboratory testing equipment worth millions of dollars.
If you have equipment that weighs more, our Formaspace laboratory design consultants can work with you to specify stationary or mobile platforms that can carry up to 8,000 pounds, or more!
3. As your business grows, modular lab furniture from Formaspace allows you to be more flexible and efficient.
Specimen Processing Laboratory Benches
The one constant in the laboratory business is change.
