On surgical floors Operating Rooms(ORs) have positive pressure checks daily to ensure air handlers are working effectively. Why is positive pressure more desirable for surgery vs. negative pressure? Can either be compared to the exhaust fan in my bathroom on a smaller scale? Thanks!
In: Engineering
I once spent time in a negative pressure isolation room. The idea was to make sure that my nasty germs did not leak out in an uncontrolled way. As long as the room I was in had a lower pressure than the rest of the hospital, my germs did not get out through the door. The way they made sure to keep my room at negative pressure was to have an exhaust fan pulling air out of the room. That exhaust fan the put the air it pulled in through a filter system that made sure no germs got through.
Operating rooms want to make sure that no germs get *in* and infect the poor guy with an open incision. So they keep positive pressure by using a fan to blow air into the operating room. And, like the exhaust fan, there is a filter system on the *intake* side of the fan to make sure they don’t have any nasty germs in the air that the fan blows into the operating room.
The basic idea is that it is easy to filter air at one point: the inlet of a pressure fan, or the outlet of an exhaust fan. Trying to filter all the air that creeps in at every crack is impossible.
Latest Answers