Horne Engineering has won a top award at the Building Better Healthcare Awards at a ceremony at The Brewery in London on Thurday 13th November 2008. Horne won the Best Interiors Product category with their entry for the Optitherm thermostatic tap.

Now in its tenth year, the annual Building Better Healthcare Awards organised by Binleys, recognises excellence, innovation and world class design in the healthcare built environment.

The judges said the Optitherm was “a truly wonderful product that demonstrated innovation and technical excellence” and the “excellent presentation at the Product Pitching Day demonstrated a clear appreciation of the needs of the healthcare environment”.

Horne Engineering, a family firm established in 1909, has applied its experience in designing thermostatic valves to the key challenges facing healthcare providers. The Optitherm has been designed to assist in infection control, ensure safe surface temperatures, make cleaning and maintenance easy and provide both thermostatically-controlled hot water and cold drinking water.

Angus Horne, Managing Director of Horne said, 'We are absolutely thrilled to have won this highly prestigious award. The design of the Optitherm is highly innovative and specialised for healthcare and the BBH award recognizes this. Here we have a product that I believe can really make a contribution to improving hand hygiene in healthcare. We design products to be the best for their particular application and designing for the healthcare environment is extremely challenging because there are so many different stakeholders that each need to benefit from the design.

We have been designing, developing and manufacturing thermostatic control products since 1909. The Optitherm is our first tap - and a century of technological development, expertise and understanding are locked into its design.'

A photo-realistic animated tour of the Optitherm was included in the BBH entry submission.
This can be viewed at www.horne.co.uk/optitherm/700Kbps/index.html

November 2008

Contacts:

Building Better Healthcare Awards: www.bbhealthcare.co.uk/awards
Contact: Laura Meade on 01268 495600 or email info@bbhealthcare.co.uk

Horne Engineering Ltd
Contact: Hannah Berry, Marketing Manager on 01505 321455