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Mac’s Safety Space: The answer, my friends, is blowing in your facility

Hospital Safety Insider, May 26, 2016

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As I think everyone is aware, there has been a lot (okay, perhaps quite a lot) of focus during our pas de deux with the regulatory survey groups running around our hospitals on the various and sundry environmental conditions (temperature, humidity, air pressure relationships) for which there are various and sundry requirements (we've discussed those general considerations in the past, but if you need a refresher, feel free to dig through the archives at Hospital Safety Center). But a recent issuance from the CDC really starts to point to some of the ways in which the whole air pressure thing can actually influence the effectiveness of the management of immunocompromised patients as a function of air pressure relationships. There's also an interesting study done by the folks at Johns Hopkins that speaks to the amount of time the doors to surgical procedural rooms are open during cases. I think we can all agree that keeping the doors shut during cases should probably be on the list of good ideas, but I suppose there can be a lot of coming and going-enough to de-pressurize the room. I've always felt that it is important to have some sense of how long it takes to de-pressurize and re-pressurize some of these critical areas; you want to make sure that folks are checking the pressure relationships when you have your greatest chance of success, recognizing that these rooms all "breathe" to one extent or another.

Read Steve's entire blog post here.

Read all of Steve's blog posts on Mac's Safety Space.

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