Hospitals can prevent the spread of diseases by using the right HVAC system

I never knew the degree of planning and foresight that goes into designing and building a hospital.  First, you have the core process that goes into the architecture of any commercial building, and that is creating a base structure that will survive years upon years of use, let alone withstand environmental abuse.  With a building as large as a hospital with the various floors and buildings that are all interconnected, great care has to go into ensuring that the foundation is solid enough to handle the size of the building. What makes designing a hospital so unique though is the factor of limiting the spread of infectious diseases.  Often entire floors will be devoted to treating one class of illnesses or health problems versus another. There will be the maternity ward, the cardiology department, and the digestive disorders floor to name a few. Even within the same floor you will find isolated rooms that have their own air systems that are cut off from the other rooms and floors of the hospital.  These are the rooms where they will put the immunocompromised or those with contagious illnesses like the flu. The isolated rooms have their own heating and cooling systems with several air purifiers and a built in dehumidifier to keep the air extremely dry. The temperature in these rooms is often kept lower than the surrounding rooms and sometimes there are two separate doors you have to walk through to get from the main hall into where the patient would be staying.  These may seem like extreme measures, but they’re essential in keeping a properly functioning hospital.

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