I’ve never really understood how these places, which naturally bring in the sick and unwell by the thousands every single day, eliminate all or any airborne pathogens, viruses that spread via contact with surfaces, or by a patient coughing or sneezing. It’s not like they lock down the whole facility and sanitize it top to bottom every time a new patient comes in, so how come these places don’t become massive hubs for the spread of disease? How are waiting rooms not considered one of the most dangerous places for transmission in the world? What steps are these doctors and professionals in the field taking to ensure that these people who are coming in sick, aren’t making everyone else in the building sick as well?
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Many hospitals have special service typically called something like “Infection prevention and control” that monitor the hospital for disease outbreaks and institute control systems.
Hospitals are a place for infectious diseases to spread. However hand hygeine and cleaning thanks to the janitors and infection control reduce the spread.
hand washing
hand washing hand washing hand washing masks special wipes
hand washing
hand washing
if youve ever been inside a childrens clinic there is a “sick” area and a “well area
oh and hand washing
Airborne diseases aren’t as common as you’d think, as well as the majority of the ones that ARE airborne are mostly contagious though large droplets only. So it isn’t like people breathing is just flooding a room/floor.
So lots of hand cleaning, proper ventilation, and surface decontamination stops most of it. A doctor going into a room and gets sneezed/coughed on isn’t just going to shrug it off and go to the next patient, they’ll clean up and change clothes at the minimum.
I work for a decent size hospital and our latest building built in 2012 has 1 floor out of the 8 floors dedicated to air and the filtration of said air. Every air handler for each floor has a 10×10 room inside of it which has very very powerful UV lights. That along with the massive hepa filters help a lot. Also facilities try their best to keep the hospital fairly cool so that disease doesn’t have to. ability to grow as easy. Then in the really dangerous cases we have negative pressure rooms. These rooms have a system which pulls the air forcefully out of the room into its own filtration system not allowing this dangerous air to escape the room. Hope this helps.
RN here who works in a hospital. The simple answer is that almost no diseases are airborne. That’s it. COVID was an outlier to a degree but even COVID barely spread that far in air. Of course they also clean hospitals…. Also most people in hospitals are not there because they have a communicable disease.
They’re a little robots that come in and flashlights in the rooms to sanitize them. As well as house cleaners. It’s constantly being cleaned. There is negative pressure air flow rooms for those with chibi risk or to have tb. There is infection control doctors that set up plans to mitigate risk as well as treat patients with infections. There’s PPE, there’s hand washing, masks, gowns, foot covering, scrubbing in…
And that being said hospitals are still some of the dirtiest places you could work in. You never want to stay there longer than you have to. But they work their ass off to make sure a plague doesn’t happen, because that’s not good for business. But there is a hell of a lot of nosocomial infections like MRSA, VRE and other super bugs that we don’t consider plagues, but are known to be located in and spread from hospitals to patients, especially those going to or from SNF/LTC/jail.
They try to be a clean as possible, but they are a center of disease spread. My friend who works in intensive care is currently off work with her 5th or 6th bout of Covid.
The HVAC systems are also designed thoughtfully. Essentially rooms will have a positive or negative charge that influences airflow.
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