With the onus on healthcare providers and their staff to protect patients against all elements of ‘avoidable harm’ perhaps never greater, Gwen Walker, a highly experienced infection prevention control nurse specialist, and David Williams, MD of Approved Air, who has 30 years’ experience in validation and verification of ventilation and ultraclean ventilation systems, examine changing requirements for, and trends in, operating theatre ventilation.
Validation and verification reporting on such vital HVAC equipment should not, they argue, merely be viewed as a ‘tick-box exercise’; it should instead ‘comprehensively inform key stakeholders, and ultimately form part of clinical governance, thus protecting those ultimately named responsible for organisation-wide safety at Trust board level’.
Like all the key elements of nature, air is taken for granted; we breathe it every day, and may think nothing about the quality of it entering, or exiting, our lungs, from and to the atmosphere. It is a commodity – there for everyone – and something we don’t have to pay for. We notice when we travel to different regions within our own country or overseas a difference in what we call ‘smell’, and sometimes ‘feel’, but perhaps seldom do we consciously think about the quality.
For the majority of us the quality of air surrounding us, engulfing our bodies, and infiltrating our internal organs and tissues, has very little impact on our health when we are well, but when we experience illness, and find we require the support of a healthcare setting, we may well fall into the category of being ‘vulnerable’ to other external factors that may cause secondary problems, and ultimately harm, if we are not aware of the potential hazards.
Log in or register FREE to read the rest
This story is Premium Content and is only available to registered users. Please log in at the top of the page to view the full text.
If you don't already have an account, please register with us completely free of charge.
