'King’s Fund’ hospital bed

Hospital bed, model number 3100M, but often referred to as the King's Fund bed, adjustable to various heights and standing on four five inch linked brake castors, with pump pedals, hydraulic lift and two way tilt, with an adjustable backrest at the head end and panelling at the foot end, made by Hoskins Healthcare Limited, Birmingham, England, 1994.

Walk into a general ward in any British hospital and you will be confronted by beds. Perhaps the most familiar piece of hospital furniture, hospitals are full of beds, but are they just like your bed at home? And if not, how – and indeed why – might they be different?

This bed is known as the ‘King’s Fund Bed’. First developed in the 1960s, it revolutionised the role played by hospital beds and set new standards for this aspect of hospital care. Previously, hundreds of different beds designs existed in British hospitals. The majority of them little more than heavy, static ‘places of rest’ – like your domestic bed – with little scope for the movements and adjustments that could assist the nursing staff with their work.

In a bid to standardise hospital beds and make them far more user friendly, a five year project established radical new specifications. The King’s Fund charity – established in the late 1800s to improve healthcare in the UK – collaborated with a design team led by Bruce Archer from the Royal College of Art (RCA). Archer took a controversial scientific approach, with extensive data collection, mathematical modelling and countless hours of observation of the ergonomics of hospital bed-related activity. This research culminated in a prototype for this bed, which was primarily designed by Kenneth Agnew, an industrial designer and key member of the RCA team. He designed a bed that was easily moved, height adjustable, had a reclining back-rest and could be easily tilted – changes activated by a series of foot pedals at floor level. Archer, Agnew and the RCA team pioneered the practice of evidence based design, which has since become much more standard.

Based on the RCA prototype, King’s Fund Beds were mass manufactured and taken up by hospitals around the country, but in the years that followed there were further changes to the design. Critics argued that the initial drive of the project was too weighted towards increasing the efficiency of nurses – of which there was a shortage in the early 1960s – rather than patient comfort. Such concerns were addressed and designs were tweaked and updated. Forty years on, the King’s Fund Bed is the type of bed we associate with hospital life, but having blazed the trail, they in turn have made way for a newer generation of even more adjustable, ‘push button’, electrically powered beds.