Most hospitals and medical facilities have strict cleanliness and maintenance requirements. Here’s why air quality should be included among those priorities.
When you’re running a business that takes care of sick people, how you maintain your facility is incredibly important. Air quality, paint colors, floor and surface cleaners, and traffic flow are just some of the building maintenance issues that can dramatically affect operations. With that in mind, consider why air quality matters in healthcare facilities.
Prevent Disease Spread
The most important reason to maintain the air quality in your building is to help prevent the spread of diseases between patients, staff, and visitors. Poor ventilation, improper purification, and high humidity can make it easy for infectious diseases to spread among people in your facility; therefore, it’s a good idea to know the signs of poor air quality.
Improve Patient Symptoms
Whenever patients are suffering from respiratory conditions, they need access to clean, fresh air to mitigate their symptoms. Poor air quality can actually make patient symptoms worse, which in turn makes them harder to treat and possibly even misleading for medical professionals. To make sure patients get an accurate diagnosis and recover quickly, keep your building’s air quality monitored at all times.
Some of the respiratory conditions that are most affected by poor air quality include:
- Asthma
- Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD)
- Lung cancer
- Bronchitis
- Laryngitis
- Pneumonia
- Influenza
Protect Expensive Equipment
Another reason why air quality matters in healthcare facilities is because these facilities contain very expensive equipment. Many of these machines are extremely sensitive and are quite costly to replace. Humidity and dust particles can ruin medical equipment, or at least make them less accurate.
Even if you don’t suspect a humidity problem in your building, you can still have a moisture problem if there’s too much dust in the air. Dust actually absorbs moisture, which is then carried to whatever surface it lands on. This makes it much easier for bacteria to grow on your machines.
Prevent Mold
Hospitals have many sinks, toilets, showers, and other damp surfaces where mold loves to grow. With so many rooms, it can be difficult to stay on top of things like mold, which tends to grow in places most people don’t look. Mold itself can be dangerous for healthy people, and even more so when it comes in contact with the infirm.
When people with weakened immune systems encounter mold in their environment, they can develop a mold infection. Sometimes, these infections come from breathing in normal amounts of mold that wouldn’t affect a healthy person, but occasionally it can mean there is a mold problem in the hospital. Always monitor mold infections in patients and investigate if a pattern seems to emerge.
Take Air Quality Seriously
In order to protect your patients, staff, and visitors, you should invest in humidity and air quality control systems and schedule regular HVAC inspections. Doing so will also protect your investment in crucial equipment and sensitive instruments that you wouldn’t want to replace prematurely.
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