Blazing a Trail for Good Design Practice

What were the issues?

A large supermarket had received a complaint from a customer about the accessible toilet facilities.  The customer had not received a prompt response to the complaint from the store and had escalated it to the local council’s Access Officer.  The customer commissioned an accessibility report and presented it to the supermarket with a list of demands in order to make the facilities compliant with Part M Building Regulations (access to and use of buildings).

Our solution:

Virosafe was asked to review the customer’s report and to undertake an Accessibility Survey in order to identify recommendations for further action.  It was established that the building was too old to require compliance with Part M Building Regulations.  However, the supermarket had made significant efforts to provide accessible facilities and wanted to assess how these facilities compared to Part M requirements and was keen to identify any further work that could reasonably be carried out to make the facilities more accessible.  Virosafe provided a detailed report that highlighted key areas of work including: 

• fitting additional equipment - hand rails (including applying a constrasting effect in a different colour from the background to aid recognition), replacement soap dispenser and toilet roll holder, automated light switch and new door lock
• adjusting the location of moveable items into more appropriate places within the room
• installing new non-slip flooring with designated transfer space being identified in a different colour to help cleaning staff understand the importance of keeping the area free of obstacles
• erecting new signage
• re-educating of cleaning staff into understanding the key issues eg not tying the alarm cord up, not leaving refuse bins in transfer spaces etc

The supermarket accepted the recommendations and all the above work was carried out by Virosafe.

The outcome …

The customer reviewed the remedial work that had been undertaken and subsequently produced another report indicating that the adjustments that had been made were not satisfactory.  The local council’s Access Officer was invited to review the work that had been done and with the addition of another toilet roll dispenser on the drop down grab rail, indicated that the supermarket had provided a solution that went significantly further than the legislation required. Virosafe was commended on providing practical advice and a cost effective solution.

The images below show before (on the left) we undertook the remedial work and after (on the right) we had completed the improvements.