The Project

Located on the water in Sydney’s inner west, Scalabrini Aged Care Facility at Drummoyne is a ground breaking new retirement village offering state-of-the-art accommodation and independent living options.

It provides a Mediterranean flavour and community feel for its largely Italian-Australian clientele, offering numerous spaces for residents to enjoy. These include a central piazza with café and ice creamery, al fresco-style seating areas, art facilities, performance spaces, exercise areas, extensive gardens, a vegetable patch, a boathouse and a wellness centre and chapel.

These areas provide therapeutic sensory experiences to improve the lifestyle of the residents and create a pleasant atmosphere.

The new facility is owned and operated by Scalabrini Village, a not-for-profit aged care provider with seven residential villages in metropolitan and rural NSW. Their mission is to provide exceptional aged care, particularly for those living with dementia, based on the traditional Italian values of community, family and mutual help.

The Problem

Because the Scalabrini Aged Care Facility had to meet the needs of special care residents, including those with dementia, its construction required the incorporation of a range of innovative new technologies, including the installation of eight highly-specialised passenger and goods lifts.

Scalabrini Village awarded construction of the facility to Hansen Yuncken, one of Australia’s leading construction companies. They have over 5,000 successfully completed projects to their name across all sectors of construction from health, education and defence to residential and senior living, hotels and entertainment.

This is a company that prides itself on continually exceeding clients’ expectations. To ensure they did that on this project, they appointed Liftronic Pty Limited to supply the new lifts for the facility.

Established in 1985, Liftronic Pty Limited predominantly operating in aged care and large government infrastructure projects.

We have more than 135 employees and offices on the East Coast of Australia. But for the specialty work that was required on the Scalabrini Aged Care Facility, we chose to work out of our head office in Matraville NSW.

The Brief

The brief was to build and install lifts that would operate in conjunction with the new facility’s range of other technologically-advanced features, designed to meet the needs of residents, including those with special requirements such as dementia.

Other innovative technologies being deployed by Hansen Yuncken in the construction process included:

• Sensor flooring that can detect movement and can alert caregivers if a patient has a fall.
• Mobile technology designed to replace traditional nursing stations, allowing caregivers to monitor patients from any location.
• Keyless entry to rooms, replacing physical keys with digital codes.
• Lighting with circadian rhythm programming which simulates the natural changes in light throughout the day to provide a more natural experience and increase patient wellbeing.
• Special patient lifters for safe, ergonomically correct patient handling and assistance.
• Patient tracking technology designed to monitor special care residents, particularly those with dementia.

Our challenge was to deliver state-of-the-art vertical transport that incorporated similar technologies to these, employing innovations that would make our lifts as user-friendly as every other aspect of this cutting-edge new facility.

The solution

Liftronic Pty Limited set about designing, building and installing the 8 new lifts required for the Scalabrini Aged Care Facility and, in light of the special care requirements, features we incorporated into the design included;

• A specialised proxy system that would allow dementia patients to easily operate the lifts.
• A wristband worn by the patient, which is programmed to allow access to their residential floor and allocated common areas and does away with the need to use the conventional elevator buttons.
• Disabled compliant buttons such as braille and dual illumination buttons.
• Larger floor areas to more easily accommodate care beds.
• Nurse call facilities that could summon assistance if required.

The Result

It’s clear that Hansen Yuncken has successfully created one of this country’s most advanced residential aged care facilities.

And the aged care community obviously agrees. Scalabrini Village won the Best Aged Care Facility award for its latest creation at the 2018 Australian Healthcare Week Excellence Awards.

The award recognised the innovation employed in the construction of the Scalabrini Aged Care Facility in Drummoyne and its success in meeting the needs of its special care residents, particularly those with dementia.

At Liftronic Pty Limited, our contribution to the project has extended our expertise and added another string to our bow in the provision of specialised vertical transport.

So if you need your lifts replaced, modernised, serviced, renovated or designed from the ground up, we invite you to elevate your expectations and speak to our team today or follow us on LinkedIn for our latest updates!