What a Broken Chair Actually Costs Healthcare Facilities
Somewhere, there’s a storage room that used to have a name and now just has a purpose: the “Furniture Graveyard.” Full of broken chairs, cracked seams, and vacant desks that nobody used anymore. They were all rolled into that one room to be dealt with later. But later never came.
Facility directors in healthcare are accustomed to thinking of furniture as a line item. Chairs and tables are an obvious need, but are reduced to a box to be checked off. Not because facility directors are negligent. Because they themselves are inundated with work and don’t have the time or capacity to deal with a single unwanted chair in a building that houses a thousand chairs.
But talk to anyone managing a hospital, and a different picture starts to form. All that broken furniture isn’t a maintenance problem, or just father time claiming another trophy. It’s a signal that the space wasn’t intentionally designed as a whole. And it’s a lesson that most people only find out after it costs them.
Custer has spent decades watching that story play out from the healthcare side of the industry. We work closely with facility directors to understand that the real issue isn’t an accumulation of old, unwanted furniture. It’s creating clinical environments designed with patient care in mind and helping employees thrive. That’s not something you can wheel into the “furniture graveyard” and forget about it.
The design of the space is an extension of the type of care patients receive at any given facility.
What the sticker price doesn’t tell you
A broken chair doesn’t just need replacing. Someone needs to decide what to do with it. It needs to go somewhere, and that room isn’t free. It’s heated. Cooled. Maintained.
There’s a sharper cost hiding in there.
Furniture that’s fallen out of code doesn’t draw a fine. It results in a citation. Physical environment standards, the ones covering whether a space is safe and functional, have topped the Joint Commission’s own list of most-cited hospital standards for more than a decade, showing up in about 60% of hospital surveys.
Enough of those add up, and it’s not a chair that’s at risk anymore. It’s accreditation. And because Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement runs through that accreditation, the number attached to an unremarkable purchase can end up a lot bigger than the purchase ever was.
And the cleaning protocols that keep a clinical environment safe are, by design, hard on materials. Standard EVS chemicals used every day on furniture will wear it out faster than normal use ever would. The piece fails, gets replaced with something similarly underbuilt, and the cycle starts again.
This is why it’s important to think of furniture as an investment in the entire space with a warranty attached. Not a one-time product purchase.
What patients don’t see
Some of the furniture that matters most in a hospital isn’t in a patient room at all.
Clinical staff work in a job that doesn’t slow down, and the space they work in either adds to that pressure or takes a small piece of it away.
On a labor and delivery floor, physician associates and nurses adjust chair height and positioning throughout every shift as they patrol from charting to patient room, and back again. A chair that fights that adjustment isn’t a comfort issue. It’s a physical tax on someone already on their feet for 12-14 hours a day.
According to an NSI survey, the average cost of turnover for a bedside RN is $60,090, resulting in the average hospital losing between $4.2m – $6.2m a year. No system wants to lose an experienced nurse or PA over something as fixable as not feeling supported in the workplace.
It’s why Parkview Health, a system that’s trusted Custer as its sole furnishings partner across every facility it operates, from waiting rooms to team workstations to the spaces staff retreat to between shifts, doesn’t treat any of those categories as an afterthought. At Parkview’s Southwest Outpatient Center, that meant staff breakrooms and touchdown areas built specifically for relaxation and informal moments, not squeezed into whatever room was left over once the patient-facing spaces were done.
The logic underneath this is simple, even if it rarely gets said out loud: patients don’t receive great care if the people delivering it don’t receive any themselves. And the cost of losing great healthcare workers is enormous.
Spaces for all people
Good clinical design has to work for anyone and everyone regardless of age, body shape, and ability. All of it shows up in the same building on the same day.
Bariatric furniture, built for larger patients, is often confined to a separate room from the waiting area, forcing patients who need that seat to venture away to find it. And that seating likely won’t be available elsewhere, in the cafeteria, the doctor’s office, or the waiting area by the front desk.
Or a wheelchair doubling as a desk chair because it was the only one that allowed someone to sit at the right height to use their computer. That’s not a hypothetical. It’s a real story that highlights a design choice, or lack of one, showing up as someone’s daily reality.
Choice and safety, across every age, body, and ability, isn’t an accessibility checkbox layered on afterward.
But that’s the unfortunate reality for many facilities. And that problem becomes exponentially bigger for an industry that is asking people from all walks of life to enter its doors. To feel seen. To feel supported. To feel cared for. Including its staff and clinicians.
In a clinical environment where its patients never got a say in what they need from it, its design has to be intentional. The challenge is that the person in charge of that responsibility is rarely its end user.
A nurse isn’t placing the purchase order for the chair that she’ll adjust a dozen times a shift, for that brief moment of calm in a chaotic ER. Standardizing well means closing that distance, not designing around it.
Where do clinics go from here?
None of this requires a capital project to start. It just requires an honest look at what’s actually driving replacement costs this year, and an honest answer to whether that’s normal wear, or furniture that was never built for what it’s being asked to do.
It’s a good hard look at who’s using that furniture, the space it’s in, and the other people that share it.
When something does eventually fail, because it inevitably will, the difference will be having a partner who treats it as the operational issue it is. Not paperwork to fill in or a chair to wheel into the furniture graveyard. Custer’s operations team steps in quickly when something breaks or a floor plan changes and replaces what needs replacing, so everyone can get back to the important work of caring for patients. Because we know that attention to detail in healthcare isn’t a “soft skill.” It’s the very foundation of everything else is built on.
You don’t have to fix the whole building this quarter. But when the cost of managing what keeps breaking finally outweighs the cost of fixing it, it helps to already know who thinks about a space this way. Custer has spent years in the rooms where these decisions are made, chair by chair, floor by floor. We live it. And we’re here to help you transform your clinical spaces.
Start a conversation about designing spaces that hold up to what your facility actually asks of them. Let’s discover what’s possible, together.
If you were with us at the Caring Spaces Tour CEU happy hour this September, then hopefully you have a real-world example of how this movement towards a more intentional design can transform healthcare. If you couldn’t make it, but are interested in learning what this could look like, then the conversation doesn’t have to end here. This is worth continuing whenever you’re ready.