Morley Glass & Glazing has won a £500,000 integral blinds contract with Belfast City Hospital and saved the hospital thousands of pounds.
Morley has supplied the hospital with its SL20 MB system, which are motorised blinds inside sealed units that were specially developed with two operating mechanisms – one for the patient to control inside their room, and a key operated override system for nurses to operate from the corridor. The electric brushless motor quietly raises, lowers and tilts the integral blinds safely, smoothly and with precision.
The integral blinds have been installed at the new £20m two-storey Acute Mental Health Inpatient Unit which has been purpose-built and sits on a 3-hectare site within the Belfast City Hospital estate. It combines mental health inpatient facilities previously spread across three Belfast sites.
Morley Glass & Glazing was approached by the architect to provide sealed units with integral blinds inside for the new mental health facility. The original specification included a ceramic frit to cover the spacer bars on the windows, which the architect felt were unsightly. Morley MD Ian Short explains: “Once we’d spoken to the architect and shown him samples of our Uni-Blind sealed units which use Technoform warm edge spacer bars, he was convinced that they looked far more appealing than other systems he’d seen on the market and this decision saved around £150 per unit.”
The new facility provides 80 acute mental health en-suite bedrooms including six psychiatric intensive care beds. The unit consists of five separate interconnecting buildings arranged around a cloistered central courtyard and communal and administration areas.
Over one million metres of warm edge spacer bars have been supplied to Morley in the four years since the business teamed up with Technoform to introduce its warm edge spacer bar technology to its Uni-Blind double-glazed sealed units with integral blinds inside.
