by Brianna Crandall — February 1, 2016—A new isolation room commissioned, built and tested by building services and engineering consultancy BSRIA on behalf of the U.K. Department of Health found that the room offers real potential to control infection in hospitals, contributing to a healthy and productive environment, and that the design could be built within a hospital environment.
BSRIA says the design was validated: a Positively Pressurized Ventilated Lobby (PPVL) room offers protection from an infectious patient and to an immune-compromised patient, but also to visitors and staff who are inside the room, by means of diluting the contaminant concentration inside the room, as well as providing a well-mixed space with no areas of higher contaminant concentration.
This novel design challenged the traditional design approach of isolation rooms – positive isolation rooms for immune-compromised patients and negative isolation rooms for infectious patients, points out BSRIA.
Blanca Beato-Arribas, BSRIA engineer, explains:
A full size physical model including ventilation systems, pressure stabilizers, hospital furniture and heat loads was built and commissioned in BSRIA’s laboratories. Multiple test methods were used to investigate and challenge the design, including anemometry testing, air tightness, commissioning of specialist ventilation devices (pressure stabilizers), heat load tests, gas tracer tests and smoke tests.
The mock-up enabled the measurement of the ventilation patterns inside the room, the airborne infection risks within and outside the room, and the thermal comfort of the occupants in the room. Also, the study of ‘what if’ failure scenarios, namely the assessment of the risk contamination in the event of fan failure or doors that were left open – and the independent validation of the design.
The facility’s design consisted of a PPVL, a neutral pressure patient’s room and negatively pressurized en suite. The room was intended to be used to accommodate either infectious or immune-compromised patients, therefore, acting as a typical negative pressure isolation room or positive one, respectively.
A new design for isolation room for airborne infections was described in the Department of Health document HBN 04-01: Supplement 1: Isolation Facilities for Infectious Patients in Acute Settings.
