To combat this, the team utilized germicidal UV lamps and installed them near the door at each stairwell internal to the isolation unit. During these measurements, they found that there was positive pressure being generated in the adjacent stairwell, which was effective against letting airborne microbes into the area, unless the doors were opened. Miller’s team performed pressure measurements throughout the experiment to ensure negative pressure was maintained. Two heating, ventilation, air conditioning (HEPA)-filtered negative-air machines were used to establish the negative pressure, as well as a temporary anteroom and plastic sheeting (with zippered openings for doors, taped to the walls), ceiling frame, and floors to ensure the space was properly sealed.ĭr. The temporary negative pressure ward was built within a unit that had its own dedicated air handling unit (AHU), dedicated bathroom exhaust systems, a firewall separating the unit from the rest of the hospital, and a separate dedicated exhaust system for return registers in existing isolation rooms (ISRs). The team tested their design in a functioning hospital unit in the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California. Their work focused on designing and implementing a negative-pressure isolation ward to handle a surge of airborne infectious patients, like would be seen in an outbreak of the diseases mentioned above. Hospital ventilation systems are designed and engineered to handle a handful of these rooms per unit, and so response plans often include moving these patients to designated areas like gymnasiums or tented-care areas built in parking lots.Ī research team, led by University of Colorado at Boulder professor, Shelly Miller, PhD, sought to change this deficiency. Despite the increasing need for such rooms, most hospitals are not equipped to handle high volumes of patients requiring them. Diseases like SARS, MERS, highly-pathogenic avian influenza, measles, and Ebola, all require airborne isolation precautions and represent the full spectrum of biological threats and events we have seen in the past 15 years. What would a hospital do if there was an influx of infectious patients who required airborne isolation? Such patients require negative pressure hospital rooms, which is extremely taxing on the healthcare system because most hospitals only have a handful of these rooms per unit.
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