Ask any porter where the wheelchairs are and you will get a shrug and a nod towards a corridor. A wheelchair is the most communal asset a care site owns: any member of staff can take one, any visitor can borrow one, and a chair that leaves with a discharged patient is rarely missed until the next person needs it. The familiar result is a site that owns thirty chairs and can find eight. Tracking them is less a technology problem than an identity problem - give each chair a name and a home, then log the handful of moments when it changes hands.
What you will learn
- Where wheelchairs actually go
- A register the whole site shares
- Labelling chairs that live hard lives
- Loans: wards, departments and patients
- Inspection and servicing
- Tools that make this easier
- FAQ
Where wheelchairs actually go
Chairs follow patients, and patients go everywhere:
- To other departments. A chair takes someone to imaging and joins the imaging pool. Nobody decided this; it just stayed.
- Out of the building. Discharges are the big leak - the chair rolls to the car park, into a taxi or a relative’s car, and the site’s count drops by one.
- Into ward ownership. Wards quietly hoard chairs against future need, so the shared pool empties while cumulative stock looks fine on paper.
- Into the broken-chair shadow fleet. A chair with a dragging brake gets parked rather than reported, and re-enters circulation the moment someone is desperate.
Large hospitals sometimes invest in RFID or RTLS location systems to fight this. For clinics, care homes and smaller hospitals, a labelled chair and a logging habit answer the same “where are the chairs?” question at a fraction of the cost - this guide covers that approach.
A register the whole site shares
One register, visible to everyone who handles chairs, with one record per chair:
| Field | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Chair ID | The number on the frame - readable down a corridor |
| Type | Transit, self-propelled, bariatric - the answer to “any chair?” is usually “no, a specific kind” |
| Seat width / size | The detail that decides whether the chair fits the patient |
| Serial number | Manufacturer identity for warranty, recalls and spare parts |
| Home base | The storeroom or bay it returns to by default |
| Current holder | The ward, department or named borrower it is with right now |
| Status | In use, in storage, in repair, retired - the broken chair stops masquerading as stock |
| Condition notes | Brakes, tyres, seat fabric, last noted issues |
| Inspection due | The date that keeps the safety checks honest |
| Purchase date | Replacement budgeting as the fleet ages |
Beds migrate around a site by the same routes, and the same register handles both - see the guide to hospital bed tracking.
Labelling chairs that live hard lives
Wheelchairs are folded, stacked, bumped into lifts and wiped down with disinfectant daily, so labels need to be chosen for abuse:
- Two marks per chair. A large painted or printed number on the backrest frame, readable at a distance, plus a durable QR label that opens the chair’s record from a phone camera.
- Frame only. The back of the backrest tube or the side frame works well. The seat and armrests wear too fast, and removable parts - footplates, cushions - lead separate lives, so a label there tracks the part.
- Durable stock. Laminated polyester or an equivalent that shrugs off wipe-downs; consider a riveted or cable-tied tag for chairs that get pressure-washed.
- Mark the home base too. A storeroom bay labelled “chairs 1-10” makes a gap visible to anyone walking past, which is half the tracking system for free.
Loans: wards, departments and patients
Chairs change hands constantly, so the logging has to be proportionate - log the hand-overs that matter, at the speed of a scan:
- Ward and department assignments. A chair adopted by a ward is fine, as long as the register says so. Assigning chairs to a location keeps the pool map honest and makes hoarding visible.
- Patient loans home. The open-ended loan against a named borrower, with condition recorded at hand-over. Community and home health care teams run largely on this list - reviewed on a cycle, it turns “gone” into “with Mrs Larsson since March, time to call”.
- Returns with a condition note. Thirty seconds at the storeroom door: brakes, tyres, frame, fabric. Anything failing goes to repair status, not back into the row.
A quick monthly physical inventory count of the home bases closes the loop - counting labelled bays takes minutes and catches drift while it is still one chair, not a fleet.
Tip: give broken chairs somewhere to go. A labelled out-of-service bay, plus a one-scan issue report, beats a faulty chair quietly returned to the corridor - where the next porter in a hurry will take it, dragging brake and all.
Inspection and servicing
A wheelchair with failing brakes is not an inventory problem, it is a falls incident waiting for a slope. Build inspections on two triggers: a periodic interval set from manufacturer guidance and local policy, and every return from a patient loan. The checks are short - brakes hold, tyres sound, footplates secure, no frame cracks, seat fabric intact - but they only count if recorded against the chair. That per-chair audit trail of inspections, repairs and condition notes is precisely what an incident review will ask to see.
Keep equipment servicing honest the same way: failed chairs get statused out of service the moment the fault is found, repairs get logged with dates and invoices, and a chair that keeps returning with the same fault becomes a documented case for retirement rather than an anecdote.
Tools that make this easier
The traditional chair register is a spreadsheet in the facilities office, and it fails for an unglamorous reason: nobody updates a spreadsheet from a corridor with one hand on a chair. The sheet is a photograph of the fleet on the day it was made, ageing by the week, with no record of who moved what or when.
AMPthilly moves the register to where the chairs are: each chair gets a profile with type, serial, condition notes, photos and inspection documents; the QR label on the frame opens that record in any phone browser - check out, return, or report a fault on the spot, no app installed; chairs can be assigned to employees, wards and locations, departments, or patients as external clients, with due dates and an overdue list for home loans; and every move, return and repair lands in a filterable audit history. The free plan covers 3 users and 25 assets - a whole chair fleet at many sites - with no card required. Larger fleets are covered on the pricing page.
FAQ
How do hospitals and care homes keep track of wheelchairs? Numbered, durable labels, a home base per chair, and logged hand-overs - to wards, departments and patients. RFID systems exist for big sites; labels plus habits do the job for most.
How do you stop wheelchairs going missing? Home bases, named borrowers for everything that leaves them, and a monthly count of the bays to catch drift early.
What is the best way to label a wheelchair? A big number on the backrest frame for distance, a durable QR label on the frame for the record. Never on seats, armrests or removable parts.
How do you manage wheelchairs loaned to patients at home? Open-ended loans against a named borrower with condition recorded both ways, and a regular review of the open-loans list.
How often should wheelchairs be inspected? On the interval your manufacturer and local policy set, plus every return from loan - with each check recorded against the chair and failures statused out of service immediately.
The takeaway
A wheelchair fleet shrinks one unlogged hand-over at a time, so the tracking system is simply the habit of logging them. Number and label every chair, give it a home bay, assign it to a ward or a name whenever it leaves, inspect on return, and count the bays monthly. None of it is sophisticated - which is exactly why it keeps working on a busy site.