🚨New paper published by members of the Thrive IAQ team including: Dr Xiangdong Li, Dr Kevin Kevin, D/Prof Lidia Morawska and Prof Jason Monty.
This paper titled, “Mitigating Airborne Infection Transmission in the Common Area of Inpatient Wards—A Case Study”, published in Fluids.
Highlights from the paper:
👉 In a hospital ward, transmission of airborne pathogens can occur in any area where people breathe the same air, including patient rooms, treatment rooms, corridors and common areas.
👉 Studies assessing the risk of exposure to airborne pathogens in common areas, in which healthcare workers spend up to 63% of their time, are rare.
👉 This study addresses this gap by simulating aerosol transport in a real inpatient ward/rooms equipped with a mixing ventilation system.
👉 Results showed that the central-return ventilation system causes directional air flows in the corridors, which enhanced long-distance aerosol transport and were conducive to infection transmission between different rooms.
👉 An improved ventilation system was proposed that aimed to reduce air mixing and minimise directional air flows.
👉 The improvement involved only rearrangement of air supply and exhaust vents, but led to significant reductions in both particle residence time and travelling distance within the ward, contributing to a nearly two-fold increase and 60% decrease in the areas of low-risk and high-risk zones, respectively, resulting in a 34% reduction in the overall infection probability in the studied area.
👉 This study demonstrated the potential of preventing hospital-acquired infection via engineering controls, and provided recommendations for future studies to assess novel ventilation configurations to reduce transmission risk.
Read the paper🔗: https://doi.org/10.3390/fluids10100267
Australian Research Council (ARC), QUT (Queensland University of Technology), University of Melbourne
