Hospital Kitchen Flooring

Flowcrete South Africa has recently worked with a number of state-of-the-art hospitals, providing ultra-hygienic kitchen floors to safeguard patient health by keeping these contamination-sensitive areas clean and clear.

It is imperative that floors in hospital kitchens facilitate a sanitary working environment - as otherwise the patients could be at risk from dangerous foodborne illnesses.

To achieve this, many of South Africa’s newest hospitals have turned to Flowcrete’s seamless polyurethane finishes thanks to the fact that they are quick and easy to clean and even incorporate an antimicrobial agent to attack bacteria and pathogens in contact with the kitchen’s floor.

Polyurethane floor coatings have become a popular choice for the kitchen and canteen areas of hospitals, replacing the traditional tiled floors. This is the case for a number of reasons, including the hygiene benefits of a seamless surface as well as the ease of maintenance and longer lifecycle.

One of the biggest projects was at the $70 million Nelson Mandela Children’s Hospital in Johannesburg, where 1,600 m² of the robust polyurethane resin floor screed Flowfresh RT was applied in the site’s kitchen, laundry and food storage area. A hard-wearing floor was imperative for these parts of the site, as being a 200-bed hospital with 600 doctors and nurses serving nearly 450 million children would inevitably put a lot of strain, wear and use on the service areas! 

The hospital’s designers knew that should the floor not be up to the task at hand then it could crack and fail, which would make it harder to clean and would increase the risk of bacteria build-up. The knock-on effect of this would be delays and disruptions while the floor is refurbished – an eventuality that itself could put lives at risk. This emphasises the importance of durable kitchen flooring that will maintain its hygienic properties for the long term.

The brand new Ahmed Al-Kadi Private Hospital in Mayville, Durban also opted to apply Flowfresh RT in its kitchens and body layout rooms. 514 m² of the HACCP International certified system in light grey was installed in the 164-bed hospital. Coving was applied along the kitchen’s edges to ensure a smooth transition from the floor to the wall and wide, stainless steel drainage channels were incorporated into the finish to make the cleaning regime quicker and easier. 

The advanced Ahmed Al-Kadi hospital specialises in providing cutting-edge medicine. Flowfresh exemplifies this commitment to utilising modern technology to improve hospital design, as it incorporates the silver-ion based bactericidal agent Polygiene®, which is able to eliminate 99.9% of bacteria in contact with the floor. 

Earlier this year the Royal Rehabilitation Hospital was opened to fill a much needed demand for a local sub-acute rehabilitation unit in Pietermaritzburg. Currently at 52 beds but geared up to grow to 102 beds, this hospital has been built with a close attention to detail in order to promote healing – an ethos that led to the developers installing 180 m² of Flowfresh RT in the kitchen.

When the long standing Netcare Parklands Hospital in Durban expanded with a new building for its Humana Healthcare Facility, the hospital needed to ensure that the principles of hygiene, durability and functionality also extended to the new part of the building. Flowfresh RT was once again chosen for the task at hand to minimise the risk of contaminants and to keep the site running on a clean, safe and reliable platform.

The complexity of hospital design means that the building materials have to meet a long list of functionality, practicality, budgetary, longevity and crucially hygiene, requirements. The number of modern hospitals that have turned to Flowfresh for kitchen floors attests to the ability of this high performance polyurethane system to successfully meet this long and demanding list of criteria.