Hospital room designs make a significant difference to the likelihood of infection being spread through person-to-person contact between medics and patients, University of Leeds research reveals.
In a study by the Institute of Public Health and Environmental Engineering at the University, led by Professor Cath Noakes, the risk of healthcare workers getting their hands contaminated and passing on infections was significantly higher in multi-bed wards than single-bed settings, even with the same levels of hand hygiene.
Professor Noakes said: “We found the multi-bed wards posed a greater risk due to a higher likelihood surfaces would be contaminated, even in areas quite a distance from already infected patients, and that the bacteria would be passed on to medics’ hands. Handwashing and cleaning are thus hugely important in all hospital wards, but even more critical in multi-bed wards, where infectious particles may be present on surfaces medics may not expect to be contaminated.”
The study’s results, published in Indoor Air, were released on 5 May to coincide with the WHO’s 2015 international hand hygiene day. Researcher, Dr Marco-Felipe King, used computational fluid dynamics to model how infectious particles released into the air settled onto surfaces across different hospital ward designs, and then developed a mathematical model of healthcare workers touching surfaces to predict the likelihood they would get pathogens on their hands. By applying this to typical healthcare worker movement during different types of patient care, and with different levels of handwashing, he identified how both human behaviour and room design affect infection risk; more than twice as many infectious particles were likely to be picked up in four-bed wards than with the same number of patients in single-bed settings.
The study was funded by an Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Challenging Engineering award, and partially supported by Arup.
