Signing a Supported Living Scheme: What Changes from a Care Home

If you have specified signage for a care home before, these are the points at which the care-home answer is the wrong answer:

• The front door is a tenant's front door, not a bedroom door. In a care home a door sign identifies a room for the staff and the family as much as for the person. In a scheme the equivalent door opens into somebody's home, and what goes on the outside of it is a conversation with that tenant rather than a line on your schedule.
• The communal entrance is a shared hallway, not a reception. There is usually no desk, no visitors' book and nobody sitting there. What the entrance needs is the scheme's own name and number, a clear indication of which way the flats run, and nothing that announces what kind of service the building is.
• There are far fewer corridor signs and far more threshold signs. A scheme is small. The wayfinding problem is not finding the dining room three corridors away; it is telling four identical painted doors on one landing apart from each other.
• The staff space is the part that goes wrong most often. An office, a sleep-in room, a locked medication cupboard and a records store are not tenants' rooms, and if they are signed in the same style and the same finish as the flats the building starts reading as an institution from the inside out.
• Turnover is faster and the occupant changes the sign. A tenancy ends, a flat is re-let, somebody wants a different picture on their door this year. A permanently engraved name is the wrong product for that; a holder a support worker can change without tools is the right one.
• The vocabulary is tenancy vocabulary. Nobody in a supported living scheme is a resident of yours, and nothing on a door should call them a service user. Flat, hallway, laundry, kitchen, bathroom, plain and short.
• Some of the building is not yours to sign at all. In a mixed-tenure or housing-association building the landlord controls the external and communal signs and you control the support side. Find that line before you write the schedule, not after the signs arrive.
• The scheme is probably one of several. A provider running eight schemes wants the same staff-office sign in all eight, so a relief worker walking into a building they have never been in can read it. That is an estate decision made once, not eight local decisions.

These are the doors nobody puts on the first draft of a schedule and everybody needs:

• Staff office, and the sleep-in room if the scheme has one.
• Medication storage, where the sign says what the room is and not what is in it.
• Records and files, and the cupboard holding the call system or assistive-technology equipment.
• Laundry, cleaning store, meter and electrical intake cupboards.
• Bin store, bike store and any external store, which are the signs most often forgotten and the ones a new support worker asks about on day one.

What that changes about the specification:

• Every bedroom door needs a changeable insert and a permanent number underneath it. The number is what the staff rota, the fire list and the handover refer to and it must never move; the insert is what tells the person which door is theirs this week.
• The insert has to be changeable in seconds, by a support worker, with no tools and nothing to order. If changing it is awkward it will not get changed, and a door with last week's name on it is worse than a door with nothing.
• The orientation signs carry more load than in a long-stay home: the toilet and bathroom from wherever people sit, the lounge, the dining room, the way out to the garden, and where to find staff. These are the signs a guest uses on their first evening.
• Short-break buildings are often shared with another service — a day service downstairs, a long-stay unit on the other side of a fire door. Where the two meet, say which is which once, at the threshold, and do not repeat it.

A scheme can be quoted from a floor plan and a door list. These are the decisions that have to exist before the quote means anything:

• The door list itself: every door you intend to sign, by number, with the wording you want on it. This is the single document that turns a scheme into a price, and it is the one most buyers do not have.
• Which doors are tenants' doors, which are shared, and which are staff or service. The three groups get different products.
• Number-only or changeable insert on the tenant-facing doors, scheme by scheme.
• The fixing method, which depends on the door: adhesive on a painted fire door, mechanical fixing on a frame, and a decision about whether anything can be screwed into a landlord's doors at all.
• The finish, and whether it is the same across your whole estate or chosen per building. One answer makes replacements trivial for years; the other makes every reorder a conversation.
• Who approves the wording. On an estate this is usually one person centrally, and on a single scheme it is the manager, and getting it wrong costs a round of reprints.
• How a single replacement gets ordered in two years' time when one sign is damaged. Signs made to order can be matched exactly later, but only if the specification was written down.