Furniture for a clinic or hospital has to stand up to frequent cleaning and seat patients and visitors of every size, and health care buildings have fire safety rules of their own. A request can cover a single waiting room or a whole clinic or hospital wing.

What a request can include

  • Waiting room and lobby seating, including bariatric seating, the term for chairs and sofas built and rated for larger occupants.
  • Patient room furniture: visitor chairs, recliners, overbed tables and storage.
  • Exam room and nurse station chairs and stools.
  • Staff break rooms, offices and conference rooms.

Standards for health care seating

BIFMA’s ANSI/BIFMA X5.4 covers public and lounge seating, and BIFMA lists waiting areas, reception areas and visitor seating in patient rooms in its scope. BIFMA X5.41 covers the same seating for larger occupants, with one set of requirements based on a 400 lb person and a second based on a 600 lb person. For office-type chairs, ANSI/BIFMA X5.11 tests large occupant chairs on a 400 lb (181 kg) basis.

BIFMA X8.1 gives manufacturers and health care professionals guidance on typical cleaners and disinfectants, cleaning methods, and how furniture surfaces hold up when exposed to them. A request can ask which cleaning and disinfecting products the manufacturer’s finishes are tested against.

For upholstery, the Association for Contract Textiles (ACT) guideline for high-traffic public spaces is 30,000 double rubs on the Wyzenbeek abrasion test, in which a machine rubs cotton duck, a heavy cotton fabric, back and forth over the fabric, and each pass back and forth counts as one double rub. ACT publishes separate guidelines for coated fabrics, which typically have one or more layers of a film such as vinyl or polyurethane on the wearing surface.

Fire safety rules for upholstered furniture

Hospitals that take part in Medicare and Medicaid have to meet the Life Safety Code, NFPA 101, under the federal rule at 42 CFR 482.41. In the federal survey checklist for existing health care buildings under the 2012 Life Safety Code, as posted by Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration, newly introduced upholstered furniture has to meet Class I or char length criteria, which measure resistance to a smoldering cigarette, and heat release criteria, which limit how much heat a piece gives off as it burns, unless the building is fully sprinklered. NFPA’s report on the next edition of the Life Safety Code ties the Class I requirement to testing under NFPA 260, a classification system for upholstered furniture components, and the char length limit of 1½ inches, the length of fabric charred in the test, to NFPA 261, a test of mock-up furniture assemblies.

All upholstered seating for indoor use also has to meet the federal flammability standard in 16 CFR part 1640. Which further fire rules apply depends on the building, its sprinklers and the state, so ask the facility’s life safety or compliance officer before a request is priced, and name the test results the facility needs.

What to send with a health care request

  • The rooms and areas, the seat count for each, and how many seats have to be bariatric.
  • The cleaning and disinfecting products the facility uses.
  • The fire test results the facility requires, and whether the building is fully sprinklered.
  • Whether patients will be in the area during installation, and any infection control rules for deliveries.

The checklist for a quote request goes through each detail.