So what are medical carts, and which one do I need? Whether you are looking for Emergency carts, Anesthesia carts, Isolation carts, Bedside carts, Phlebotomy carts, Medication carts, or specialized models, such as custom workstation carts, Waterloo Healthcare has you covered with our wide range of products! We offer two types of cart construction (aluminum or steel), each of industrial quality with four different cart heights, three cart widths, and a series of drawers with multiple configurations, drawer colors, locks, and other features that will allow you to create the perfect cart for your medical facility needs.
Pick between steel and aluminum carts
First and foremost you have a choice between steel or aluminum construction for your carts.
Aluminum offers a lightweight platform that is perfect for transport carts that are highly mobile and require full swivel, such as emergency carts in hospitals. Aluminum carts include drawer storage dividers, large contemporary drawer pulls, and a modular accessory mounting system. Aluminum carts also come standard with two independent pull-out side shelves that virtually double your carts surface workstation. Steel offers a great blend of functionality and economy for emergency medical carts. It is the “ tried and true” workhorse medical cart of the Waterloo healthcare offering and has been around for over 50 years. Steel carts include one slide-out side shelf that provides an additional cart top work surface to keep items in view and easy to access. Both Aluminum and steel medical cart workstations carry the same five-year warranty, are equally durable, and will provide many years of reliable service.
Decide on the size of your medication cart
Next, choose your cart’s height. This is easily done by first selecting your desired drawers and shelving configurations. Our drawers come in 3”, 6”, 9” and 12” heights so imagine the drawer configuration that will best suit your storage needs and it will be easy to determine your cart height. Our “Short” cart provides 21” of drawer space so any configuration of drawers that adds up to 21” can fit within our “Short” cart cabinet. Our “Medium” cart accommodates 24” of drawer space, “Tall” carts allow for 27” and “Extra tall” carts allow for 30” of drawer space. Our short carts are 36”H, Medium carts are 39”H, Tall carts are 42”H and our Extra Tall carts are 45”H.
Pick the color of the cart cabinets
You then have your choice of three cart cabinet colors. Light Gray, Electric Blue, or Red. Typically our Red and Electric blue cart cabinets are for use with emergency/code carts. Red and Electric blue cabinets make the carts easy to distinguish between standard procedure carts with light gray cabinets. This improves code team response times through rapid identification of the carts. Usually, light gray cabinets are a good choice for general healthcare carts.
Choose a lock system
Now onto locks; we offer lots of ways to secure your new Waterloo medical carts. From a simple key lock all the way up to dual credential wifi-enabled electronic locks, we have a lock for every need! All Waterloo carts come standard with a key lock or lever lock. Lever locks are designed to be used with plastic tamper-evident seals (typically for crash cart use or anywhere that “tamper evidence” is required). For your additional “tamper evidence” needs, we can add individual gate-locks to each drawer that allow you to independently secure drawers that may contain medication. This offers an added benefit for your supply team so that they will know which storage drawers were accessed and allow them to restock items in just those drawers. Resupply times will be greatly reduced, and your medical carts can get back into service quickly!
If you want to eliminate keys, then our simple mechanical push button lock is an economical way to do that and doesn’t require battery replacement (as it’s 100% mechanical)! The push button lock can be used on both steel and aluminum carts, making it a great fit for any of your carts.
If you require automatic relocking, and/or audit trails to see who’s been in and out of a particular cart, then our electronic locking options provide the security you need. From a simple electronic keypad to proximity card readers that can work with your employee badges, we have a solution for you. Our electronic locks operate on D cell batteries and come standard with a 10-minute automatic relock feature. The relock time is user adjustable with the lock manager software that comes with the purchase of your cart. Only one copy of the software is needed to manage your hospital’s entire fleet of electronic locking carts. For smaller cart fleets you are able to adjust cart lock settings by physically plugging your laptop into the cart’s data port via a data cable (Included with lock manager software) and updating the settings. Larger cart fleets may find it easier to use our wifi-enabled locks that allow you to update cart settings by pushing the data out via wifi. This automated process eliminates the need to walk cart to cart to perform necessary updates, computing, or pull audit trails.
Finally, we have dual credential controlled substance locks available. These locks require two credentials in order to unlock. These locks are specifically designed for the OR where controlled substances are used and require a higher level of security. Simply wave a valid employee badge over the proximity reader and all the drawers except the top (narcotics) drawer open. Then, by entering a valid second numeric code, the top drawer in the medical cart will unlock. This ensures that two individuals are present when the controlled substance drawer is opened and will improve the overall security of your medication and narcotics.
Select the drawer colors for your mobile medical carts
Finally, you can choose from 16 available drawer colors. With drawer fronts in White, Light Gray, Natural, Yellow, Orange, Red, Wine, Pink, Violet, Dark Blue, Electric Blue, Light Blue, Teal, Spring Green, Fairway Green, and Charcoal, you are able to personalize your cart. Drawer front colors make it easy to identify carts for specific procedures – Yellow for isolation carts, Red or Blue for emergency carts, etc. You can maximize your staff’s efficiency and reduce “time to treatment” by color-coding your medical carts by procedure!
Customized Medical Utility Carts with Drawers and Storage
You can further customize your cart with an equally wide array of accessories. From IV poles to cardiac boards, power strips, trays/dividers, etc….we have the accessories and solutions you need to provide the functionality you are looking for in a procedure cart.
Waterloo Healthcare has been manufacturing reliable medical carts for over 50 years! We pride ourselves on offering a wide variety of options that will help you create the perfect cart for your particular procedure!
Find the ideal medical cart organizer at an affordable price
Waterloo offers an almost endless variety of treatment cart configurations that can be tailored to provide specific solutions for your medical cart needs. For example, Isolation carts store large bulky personal protective equipment (PPE), necessary to keep staff and patients safe from infection while in a hospital. So having access to large/deep drawers allows the maximum amount of storage space for gowns, bonnets, booties, masks, gloves, and other PPE. The more supplies stored on the carts, the fewer times your central supply team will have to restock each cart. Not only does this free up central supply staff’s time, but it ensures that attending medical staff and visitors always have unrestricted access to the Personal Protective Equipment they need to tend to their patients and/or family. Waterloo offers drawers in four different depths (3”, 6”, 9” and 12”) and two different widths (22”W or 16.5”W) to accommodate any large item or bulk storage requirement and increase utility.
As another example of the adaptability of Waterloo carts, we can look at Anesthesia carts and their need for storage beyond what’s offered in the standard drawers. Anesthesia carts oftentimes will have several tilt bin arrays that store various sized syringes, tape, and other smaller items that need to be at the ready. Waterloo has a wide variety of tilt bin options as well as dedicated tape dispensers for the labeling of syringes and IV lines. This keeps small but critically needed supplies within arms reach. Catheter holders mounted to the side of the cart keep catheters readily available and safe from being bent or kinked due to being stored in over-packed drawers. Hospital-grade power strips can be mounted to the outside of a Waterloo anesthesia cart in order to provide power to a variety of anesthesia-related equipment (Laryngoscope battery charger, Laptops, etc.). The included metal drawer dividers in Waterloo Aluminum carts provide “out of the box” organization. They can be customized to create a virtually endless number of drawer compartment configurations. Add in the available removable drug trays, and you have an unparalleled variety of organization solutions that make it easy to transfer supplies throughout your medical facility.
Waterloo emergency carts can be customized in the same way that our anesthesia carts can, which makes them ideal workstations. With accessory options that include the standard code cart requirements of cardiac boards, sharps container brackets, IV pole, Oxygen tank brackets, and defibrillator shelves, you have a lot of options with a cart by Waterloo Healthcare. Beyond the standard accessories previously listed, there are other available accessories that can facilitate the functionality of the Waterloo Healthcare emergency cart. Accessories such as glove box holders can be used to keep PPE within easy access, and a portable suction unit tray that allows for rapid access to a battery-operated suction pump, for use in clearing a patient’s airway, can be very helpful in a code situation. Additionally, a wire basket mounted to the side of the cart can offer a place to store code charts, logs, and reference sheets which can provide convenient access to your necessary documentation.
Regardless of how you use your carts, Waterloo procedure carts are infinitely adaptable for any procedure cart need that medical professionals require when caring for their patients.
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