Hospital (bed) lifts

Hospital lifts: what to consider

The car size is determined not by the bed but by the bed together with the people around it. An ICU bed with a stand, equipment and two medics on either side - that is the design case. So the car depth matters more than its width, and the door opening in hospital lifts is made at least 1200 mm wide: through a narrower one the trolley has to be brought in at an angle and straightened up once inside.

A through-type car with doors on two sides is far more common in hospitals than in housing: the patient is wheeled in from the admissions side and out towards the operating theatre suite without turning round. But the through-type design costs more, takes up more floor space and requires both shaft walls to be suitable for doors. This is built into the building design, not discovered during installation.

Controls. A hospital lift almost always has a priority call mode: staff use a key or code to call the car to the required floor, and it goes there without intermediate stops. Separately, during commissioning the acceleration and deceleration curve and the levelling accuracy are set - a one-centimetre step, unnoticeable in an office, is already a threshold for a trolley on castors.

Healthcare is the largest part of our work: 56 contracts with 21 medical institutions worth UAH 87.2 million. That is roughly a third of all 163 of the company's contracts in the Prozorro register. The largest is a major overhaul of the lift equipment at the Ivano-Frankivsk Regional Children's Clinical Hospital (municipal non-profit enterprise), 132 Yevhena Konovaltsia St.: UAH 18.1 million, UA-2026-05-22-011304-a. At the Storozhynets Multidisciplinary Intensive Care Hospital we installed a hospital lift together with a steel-frame shaft in the outpatient department - UAH 4.7 million, UA-2023-08-05-000365-a. At the Rozhniativ Multidisciplinary Hospital - a lift in the surgical building, UAH 3.4 million, UA-2024-11-14-015565-a. And with the Lung Health Centre in Lviv (a municipal non-profit enterprise of Lviv Regional Council) we have fourteen contracts: lifts and renovation of premises, including the admissions department.

The main difference between a hospital and any other site is that patient admissions never stop. Hence the phasing: in a building with two lifts, one stays in service while the other is dismantled, and the work sequence is agreed with the administration before starting, not along the way. Where there is only one lift, we agree in advance how bedridden patients will be moved during those few weeks - that is a matter for the medical director, not the installation crew. Noisy work - openings, welding, strengthening floor slabs - is scheduled around the department's timetable. We close off the shaft with a dust-tight partition and route construction waste removal past the wards and the operating theatre suite, not through them. Add to that passes, sanitary rules and escorts on the premises: none of this shows in the cost estimate, but it takes up a noticeable amount of time.

It is worth knowing the limitations in advance. A hospital lift is usually slower than a passenger lift of the same rated load, because it is tuned for ride comfort rather than speed. And a single such lift does not solve the problem for a building: if it breaks down, there is no way to move a bedridden patient. Where possible, we recommend two lifts and a supply from a backup power feed.