#BUILDING A NEGATIVE PRESSURE ROOM PORTABLE#

#BUILDING A NEGATIVE PRESSURE ROOM PORTABLE#

In an interview with WCMH-TV, Jo Henman, director of infection prevention at OhioHealth, in Columbus, said her facility has 85 inpatient negative-pressure rooms and, thanks to portable high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filters, the ability to create more if needed. Moreover, the ambulance bay and an adjoining “hazmat room” are tailored for “seamless transformation” into a pandemic-ready area. Some, like Humber River Hospital, in Toronto, built in 2015 with “SARS foremost in our mind,” according to president and CEO Barbara Collins, are purpose-built to be “pandemic safe.” She told Toronto’s The Star that her hospital is capable of isolating entire departments under negative pressure. But a pandemic with a fast-spreading mystery virus has meant many facilities are having to come up-quickly-with more places to keep the COVID patients safely isolated. Most hospitals, small and large, have some form of negative pressure space. “Hospital ventilation systems are designed and engineered to handle a handful of these rooms per unit,” she wrote in a 2017 article, “and so response plans often include moving these patients to designated areas like gymnasiums or tented-care areas built in parking lots.” 2 Popescu, a hospital epidemiologist and infection preventionist, has researched the role of infection prevention in facilitating global health security efforts. 1 But despite the increasing need for negative pressure rooms, Saskia Popescu, PhD, MPH, MA, CIC, and a member of Infection Control Today ®’s Editorial Advisory Board, says most hospitals are not equipped to handle the high volumes of patients requiring them. In the case of a pandemic, says Nick Clements, PhD, an investigator at the University of Colorado, Boulder, wrote in a 2014 blog post, hospitals should be prepared for at least a 300% to 500% increase in ICU and isolation room capacity. In New York, the current epicenter of the pandemic, total cases crested to 75,000 in early April-and the peak hadn’t even been reached yet. But the need for such rooms can put extreme stress on hospitals, which are not always ready to handle influxes of infected patients-let alone in the massive numbers of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Positive pressure rooms are usually used for patients with compromised immune systems negative pressure rooms are common in infection control, to ensure infectious germs don’t spread via the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) system.Ī negative pressure room is particularly crucial when something like coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) strikes-this new virulent killer is too much of an unknown quantity to take even the smallest chances of spreading. Clean filtered air is pumped in if there’s a leak, the air is forced out of the room. By contrast, a positive pressure room maintains a higher pressure inside the treated area than that outside it. One way to do this is with a negative pressure room, in which a lower air pressure allows outside air into the room any air that flows out of the room has to pass through a filter. Nowadays, it means having a room or unit in which the infected air is rerouted, away from other patients and hospital staff. Modern hospitals have isolation down to a science, literally. Dealing with infectious diseases still comes down to containing the spread. During the Middle Ages, people tried to escape the plague by sequestering themselves-not an easy task (then or now).

Building a negative pressure room