Modifying ICU Rooms to Protect Health Care Workers During the COVID 19 Crisis: Brief Report

Author Info

Ehab Daoud Marissa Su Mia Shokry

Corresponding Author

Ehab Daoud
Assistant Professor of Medicine, John A. Burns School of Medicine, University of Hawaii, USA

A B S T R A C T

Background: With the growing crisis of the pandemic COVID-19, healthcare providers have been put under tremendous emotional stress and physical strain attempting to protect themselves from contracting the infection while caring for critically ill patients. This task is further challenged by the global shortage of the protective equipment recommended for their safety. Methods: In two different ICUs in different hospitals in Hawaii, we were able to modify our rooms, both those equipped and not equipped with negative pressure capabilities. We were able to remove the intravenous pumps, feeding tubes, and even the ventilator monitors out of the patient room without affecting the negative pressure inside the room. The purposes of such measures were to reduce the exposure risk for nurses, respiratory therapists, radiology technicians, and physicians from entering the room for routine medication changes, blood draws, or ventilator checks. Those measures are by no means to neglect the patients from physical examination, communicating with the patient if alert enough, or emergency situations. Conclusion: The modifications implied are feasible, practical and conceptually safe to implement. We hypothesize that those measures will reduce the number of times entering the rooms for routine measures, thus reducing personnel exposure, infection rate, and reducing the growing need for the now precious PPE. Additionally, it will enhance response time to medications needs or ventilator adjustments.

Article Info

Article Type

Case Report

Publication history

Received: Mon 18, May 2020
Accepted: Mon 01, Jun 2020
Published: Fri 26, Jun 2020

Copyright

© 2023 Ehab Daoud. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Hosting by Science Repository.
DOI: 10.31487/j.CEI.2020.02.04