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Prioritising accessible maintenance
Posted on behalf of: Better Campus Team
Last updated: Wednesday, 7 June 2023
We are making progress towards making our campus more accessible to everyone.
Our new Student Centre is accessible to everyone and accessibility has been a guiding principle in the design of our West Slope development. Making our existing buildings fully accessible is more challenging, but we are making improvements, such as a new accessible entrance to Silverstone being built this year. We are also developing our plans to provide new accessibility solutions to the external public areas in the Library, Institute of Development Studies and School of Media, Arts and Humanities.
It’s also important to make sure we maintain what we already have – keeping our lifts, doors and accessible facilities working is essential. Taking on board feedback from staff and students, we have now upgraded our service response time to faults that impact accessibility. Accessibility-related issues are now classified as urgent and assigned a Priority 2 level, which means we commit to attend the issue within a three-hour timeframe and resolve the issue within 72 hours. Further information on priority levels is outlined below.
Please note, campus residents should contact their reception to report faults.
You can read more about campus accessibility on the Staff Hub and report a fault on our Sussex Estates and Facilities webpages.
Find out more about our aim to build an Inclusive Sussex.
Priority Levels
Priority 1 – Emergency: please call the Service Centre on 0127387 7777. We are committed to attending the fault within 20 minutes and resolving the fault within 24 hours.
Tasks will be classed as Priority 1 in the event of:
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Significant and immediate danger to life or risk to security
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Major damage to building fabric, mechanical and electrical equipment, or other infrastructure, that poses a health and safety risk or makes the building inoperable
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Anything that causes teaching, research, residential or commercial activities to cease or experience significant disruption during regular working hours.
Priority 2 – Urgent: please call the Service Centre on 0127387 7777. We are committed to attending the fault within 3 hours and resolving the fault within 72 hours.
Tasks will be classed as Priority 2 in the event of:
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Adverse impact to the material comfort, convenience and/or welfare conditions of University users, to the extent that a space cannot be used
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Disruption to University operations, e.g. a lecture theatre or large office out of use
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Loss of heating and hot water in any location during the winter heating season, typically October to early May
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Accessibility impacts (automatic doors, disabled WCs, lifts)
Priority 3 – Routine: please email the Service Centre on ServiceCentre@sef.fm. We are committed to attending the fault within 72 hours and resolving the fault within 2 weeks.
Tasks will be classed Priority 3 in the event of:
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Any other disruptions that are not urgent or an emergency
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Minor local outages or disruptions
If you are unsure of the priority level of a task, please visit the webpages or contact the Service Centre.