Care home design tips for residents with poor eyesight

• Optimal Lighting: Adequate lighting is crucial for residents with poor eyesight. Incorporate both natural and artificial lighting sources, with the ability to adjust brightness levels as needed. Maximize natural light where possible and consider metallic elements to enhance its effects.
• Color Contrast: Choose bold and bright colors for key objects like furniture to ensure clear visibility for residents with poor eyesight. Avoid color schemes where similar shades blend together, as this can cause confusion and difficulty in distinguishing between objects.
• Accessible Fixtures and Fittings: Install handrails, clear signage, and easy-to-use dimmer switches strategically to assist residents in moving safely around the care home. Ensure these aids do not obstruct pathways but instead provide support and guidance where needed.
• Clear Entrance and Exit Signage: Make entrances and exits easily identifiable with clear signage and additional lighting to assist residents in navigating between rooms. Ensure entrances and corridors are wide enough to accommodate residents comfortably.

Designing or refurbishing a care home carries with it some very unique challenges, especially when you consider all of the different requirements of the residents, such as those with sight loss.

You need to be as accommodating as possible whilst also taking your budget and time constraints into account, which can make for a difficult juggling act.

To ensure your planning phase goes smoothly, take a look at some of the tips provided by the Aedifice team below.

Best ways to light a care home or residents with poor eye sight

Not only can good lighting improve one’s health and mood, it can also help compensate for poor vision.

It’s critical to consider different people’s lighting requirements when designing a shared living area, which is why it’s important to add lighting to a room in such a way that it can be easily modified to suit residents’ needs.

How much lighting you need will depend on how much natural light you can get into the space. Natural light carries with it more benefits than artificial light, so consider using more metallic elements in your design to maximise this.

Colour schemes

For residents with poor eyesight, it’s not always easy to properly make out the difference between greens blues and purples, meaning that they can all end up blending into one.

To help residents clearly identify key objects in a room such as furniture, try opting for products in brighter, bolder colours.

This should be considered for: tables, chairs, beds and toilet seats.

Fixtures and fittings in care homes for residents with poor eye sight

To ensure that residents can travel safely from room to room, or get themselves in and out of bed or the shower, well-placed fixtures and fittings can be a great help.

Elements such as handrails, clear signage and easy-to-use dimmer switches are all things to consider.

When planning where to install these movement and stability aids, think about the path that a resident might take through a room naturally.

Handrails, for example, should help a resident through a room, not become an obstruction.

Entrances and exits signs in care homes

Being able to easily identify entrances and exits is vital for residents to be able to easily move between rooms, which is why their design should be carefully considered.

As well as ensuring that entrances and corridors are wide enough, providing additional lighting in these areas can be a great help for residents to identify them from a distance.

Aedifice Partnership is a leading consultancy and project management firm specializing in delivering high-quality projects across various sectors, including care homes, residential properties, education establishments, and commercial properties.

Our range of services includes project management, chartered building surveys, CDM and quantity surveying among others.

At Aedifice Partnership, we manage new care home construction as well as refurbishment projects throughout the UK.

For further details on the services Aedifice Partnership offers, visit www.aedifice.co.uk or call 0800 151 0234.