“We’ve been searching for cots like these for 3 years!”

The person who said this in our showroom the other day, was from an organization that runs dozens of child care rooms. She was talking about the Community Playthings cots and their vertical cot cart. But she’s not a director of a centre or even an EC educator. She’s an ergonomist for workplace health and safety.

Her visit gave us whole new insight into Community Playthings’ careful design, “This is could save us a lot of lost work hours.”

Side-stacking Cart is a Back Saver

This organization has lost hundreds of work hours to back problems. The unique Vertical Cart for Community Playthings Cots stacks the cots on their sides, not flat on their legs. Stacking them sideways means you can take advantage of gravity to put them on the floor – without lifting or bending low to get to the last cots, as is typical for most cot carts.

For putting them back on the cart, you can’t avoid some bending. But levering them up to slide into place results in a lot less potential strain. The cart is custom moulded specifically for the uniquely angled legs of CP cots, making, removing or returning the cots, easy.

“Most of the time, the cot dollies are stored away in cupboards,” our visitor explained. “It’s easy to twist your back and torso, getting in and out of that tight squeeze.” The Community Playthings cart’s four fully rotating castors makes it a lot easier to manœuvrer 15 or 20 cots into a tight space. Often, less expensive mobile furniture has just two free spinning wheels.

Child bed hygiene

Community Playthings Cots (come in toddler and full-size) have important design features to help protect the health and safety of children in care, too. For hygiene reasons, especially with increased issues with lice, it’s important to keep bedding separate and specific for each child. That’s why Community Playthings Cots, have a pocket on the back of each cot. “We were actually looking into sewing pockets of our own onto our cots.”

There is also a name tag integrated into the frame of each bed – so that bed and bedding is used by one specific child only.

The folks at Community Playthings also designed the carts in such a way that cots can only be stacked with the labels out to face the caregiver, so you can find the cot you’re looking for.

That brings us back to the ingenuity of the side stacking design: absent student’s cots don’t impede access to the other cots. With a vertical stacked dolly, you have to remove a cot you don’t need to get the cots you do need, below it (and then put it back). By side stacking, staff can take out just the specific cot without removing and returning any others.

The Side Stacking Cart is an option with the Community Playthings cots – they also make a dolly for their cots (available in toddler and full-size) -- with a bit of a twist. The dolly is actually a full featured cot with four locking castors, saving you space, time and money. With their standard dolly -- you’ll still get the same great cots. But the 15 or 20 cot cart for Community Playthings might just save you some back pain too.

Significantly reducing this daily strain won’t solve every back problem.  But it will diminish a constantly cited irritant that significantly contributes to the loss of work hours.