Reducing Risk of Airborne Transmitted Infection in Hospitals by Use of Hospital Curtains

Abstract

An in-patient suffering from an airborne infectious disease should be properly isolated in a negative-pressure isolation room to prevent hospital-acquired infection. However, before the infectious status is identified by clinical diagnosis, the patient may be assigned to stay with others in a hospital ward with multiple beds. Under these circumstances, there may be a risk of infection of the neighboring patients. Therefore, reasonable infection control measures should be implemented in multi-bed hospital wards, intensive care units, among others. The use of hospital curtains as physical barriers against transmission of disease is potentially a simple but effective method to reduce the risk of infection. In this investigation, the effectiveness of hospital curtains in prevention against airborne transmission of diseases in hospital rooms was evaluated by numerical modeling analysis. A computational fluid dynamics (CFD)-statistical hybrid modeling method, which was validated by tracer gas measurements, was employed to determine the transient dispersion of airborne contaminants. It was found that among all the case studies, the use of curtains between two beds could reduce the peak concentration for each individual neighboring patient in a bioaerosol dispersion process. A curtain fully extended to the length of a bed yielded significantly higher protection than a partially extended curtain and the reduction in peak concentration could be as much as 65%.

Measurement of ventilation and airborne infection risk in large naturally ventilated hospital wards

“…Nevertheless, the findings from such studies have been shown to concur with data from other laboratory studies and from outbreaks. The results in this study agree with other studies in more controlled laboratory environments and computational simulations that show the benefits of using partitions between beds to restrict airborne pathogen movement [18,20,38,40,[45][46][47]. In terms of outbreaks, Gustavson's study [50] shows that tracer gas concentrations measured in a children's ward correlated to varicella transmission, while analysis of the 2003 SAR's outbreak in Hong Kong showed that actual transmission patterns compared well to simulations of both indoor [51] and outdoor [52] airflow paths.…”

“…The partitions were very effective at containing the source which has the potential to protect patients either side of the partition walls. This concurs with early studies in real hospital environments [45,46], laboratory studies with biological aerosols [38] and recent numerical modelling work [20,47].…”

The Role of Nursing Activities on the Bioaerosol Production in Hospital Wards

“…Since so many bioaerosol generating activities occur behind closed curtains it is possible that curtains may provide a temporary barrier to the transport of potentially infectious particles to other patients, as found by researchers in Hong Kong [30] Simply keeping curtains closed until particles have settled may thereby limit transfer to other patient areas. However even with particles as large as 5µm this could take several hours which is unfeasible.…”

Bioaerosol deposition in single and two-bed hospital rooms: A numerical and experimental study

“…Consequently this space exposes a gap for potential passage of pathogens, increasing cross transfer susceptibility. Previous numerical simulations have shown that full height partitions may reduce airborne transmission risk [26] and that those curtaining the length of patient beds are more effective than partially extended ones at preventing infection [40,41]. Physical barriers clearly point to effective intervention measures however further evaluation is needed to explore the most appropriate design and the limitations of such an approach.…”