Sectors

Healthcare Lifting Equipment & Patient Handling

Patient hoists, slings, plant room lifting and passenger lifts examined, maintained and certified across hospital, hospice and care home estates. One asset register, one programme, one portal — UK and Ireland, engineering since 1897.

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Lifting Equipment Across Healthcare and Care Estates

A hospital or care estate holds two very different populations of lifting equipment, and they are usually managed by two different people.

On the ward and in the bathroom there is patient handling equipment: mobile hoists, ceiling track systems, stand aids, bath lifts and the slings that go with them. This equipment lifts people. It is used many times a day by clinical staff rather than by engineers, and it is the equipment a regulator asks about first.

Behind the scenes sits everything else. Chain blocks over plant room pumps, jib cranes in the estates workshop, lifting beams above air handling units, the anchor points a contractor hangs a hoist from when a lift motor has to come out, and the passenger, bed and goods lifts themselves. Ordinary industrial lifting equipment, in a building that cannot close.

WH Scott Group has worked in lifting and engineering since 1897 and completes over 400,000 statutory examinations a year across the UK and Ireland. WH Scott, Re-Ropes and Metlab together cover patient hoist inspections, LOLER and PUWER thorough examination, crane and hoist maintenance, lift rope and shaft beam work, and accredited engineering inspection — so one asset register can be surveyed, certified and maintained under a single contract.

Key Lifting & Compliance Challenges in Healthcare

Equipment operated by clinical staff, not engineers. A hoist is used by carers under time pressure, often in a confined bathroom, next to someone vulnerable. Pre-use checks get skipped, slings get swapped between hoists, and labels fade in the laundry. HSE guidance on hoisting people is clear that lifting equipment and accessories need to remain uniquely identifiable — and unlabelled slings are among the most common findings on a healthcare examination.

Slings and accessories drift off the register. Hoists are large, numbered and hard to lose. Slings are not. They move between rooms, get replaced by ward staff, arrive with new residents and disappear into laundry cycles. Because slings are lifting accessories in their own right, each one carries its own examination duty. A register listing twelve hoists and an unknown number of slings is not a defensible record.

Access, infection control and buildings that never close. Wards, theatres, dementia units and hospice rooms stay open. Examination work is scheduled around clinical activity, frequently with escort, permit or vetting requirements attached to whoever goes on site, and always with infection prevention constraints on what can be taken onto a ward and how it is cleaned.

Two equipment populations, two supply chains, one duty holder. Patient handling equipment is often bought and serviced through a medical devices route, while plant room lifting sits with estates and passenger lifts with a lift contractor. The statutory duty does not divide up the same way. When evidence is requested, it is requested for the whole site.

Intermittent use does not reduce the duty. A bariatric hoist used twice a month, a mortuary hoist, a hydrotherapy pool hoist and a spare stand aid in a store cupboard all fall due on the same cycle as equipment in daily use. Equipment nobody handles is equipment nobody notices is overdue.

Two healthcare working talking to an elderly lady in a wheelchair

How WH Scott Group Supports Healthcare and Care Providers

The register comes first. Work usually starts with a site survey and asset register build — identifying, tagging and recording every hoist, sling, stand aid, bath lift, chain block and lifting accessory across the site or the group, then reconciling that against whatever register currently exists. Untagged items get tagged. Items that have dropped off the schedule get picked up.

Patient handling equipment examined by competent engineers. Our directly employed engineers carry out LOLER thorough examination of patient hoists and slings on mobile and ceiling track systems, stand aids and bath lifts, with every sling assessed individually against its own identification. Because this equipment lifts people, it falls into the most frequent examination category and is scheduled accordingly.

The rest of the estate on the same programme. Plant room chain blocks, workshop jib cranes, lifting beams and loose lifting tackle are covered by thorough examination and preventative maintenance from the same team. Where a site also holds pressure systems, LEV extraction in a laboratory or sterile services department, or portable appliances, those examinations can be grouped into one combined statutory programme rather than sitting on separate contracts.

Passenger, bed and goods lifts. Re-Ropes has supplied and fitted lift ropes independently since 1986, covering traction and governor ropes, belts, compensating cables, sheave refurbishment and lift shaft beam load testing — the anchor points a maintenance team hangs a hoist from when a machine has to come out. Independent of any lift manufacturer, and able to work alongside your existing lift maintenance provider.

Evidence an inspector can be shown in a minute. Every report is issued digitally to our online certification portal, with defects graded by urgency, next-due dates tracked per asset and the full examination history held item by item. Registers are laid out ready for CQC, RQIA, Care Inspectorate, CIW and HIQA inspection, and for your insurer.

Remedial work by the same engineers. Where an examination finds a defect, the repair, replacement sling or load test is quoted and carried out by our own teams from depots across the UK and Ireland rather than passed to a third party — so equipment returns to service faster.

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Tell Us About Your Project

Whether you need a single piece of equipment or a fully engineered lifting system, our specialists can help. Tell us your load, environment and compliance requirements — we’ll do the rest.

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Compliance & Regulations

WH Scott can ensure your lifting and patient handling equipment is compliant in both the UK and Ireland, where different legislation is applicable.

Lifting equipment used in healthcare and patient handling environments in the UK is subject to a range of legal and technical requirements, with the Lifting Operations and Lifting Equipment Regulations (LOLER) 1998 and Provision and Use of Work Equipment Regulations (PUWER) 1998 among the key requirements.

For operations in Ireland, S.I. No. 299 of 2007 sets out relevant requirements for the use, examination and maintenance of work equipment.

These regulations cover areas including the suitability, safe use, inspection, examination and maintenance of relevant equipment, helping healthcare organisations maintain safe environments for patients, carers and staff.

Depending on the equipment and working environment, other requirements and standards may also apply, including applicable BS EN standards for lifting and patient handling equipment, as well as requirements relating to electrical, mechanical and medical equipment.

WH Scott Group provides inspection, examination, maintenance and technical services to help healthcare organisations meet their lifting equipment and patient handling compliance responsibilities. Explore our more detailed guidance:

UK: LOLER inspection and thorough examination services and PUWER inspection services
Ireland: lifting equipment inspection services in Ireland and further guidance on S.I. No. 299 of 2007 – Maintenance of Work Equipment