News

During the ongoing COVID-19 global pandemic, we as a society are rightfully quick to support and celebrate our healthcare workers - the doctors, nurses, respiratory therapists and those who interact with patients day in and day out.

But for those caregivers to do their critical work, a team behind them has been hard at work preparing and planning for an event unprecedented like this - before the virus even landed on our American shores.

One of the most important needs for a hospital in a pandemic situation such as this includes proactively reconfiguring hospital rooms into something called "negative pressure rooms."

At the very heart of its definition, a negative pressure room exists and is designed to fully protect patients and the general public from the spread of infectious diseases.

According to Tom Davis, System Vice President for Facilities, Construction & Real Estate, a negative pressure room uses lower air pressure to allow outside air into the segregated environment. "This traps and keeps potentially harmful particles within the negative pressure room by preventing internal air from leaving the space. Negative pressure rooms in hospitals isolate patients with infections conditions ... and protects everyone else from potential exposure.

"A great deal of planning and construction work needs to go into ensuring these hospital rooms are adequately prepped to deal with the kind of pandemic we are now faced with," Davis continues. "We've worked hard and fast to change the environment of numerous rooms and floors throughout all four of our hospitals, adding high-tech 'air-scrubbers,' ventilation equipment on the roof. This is all to ensure that the care environment is as healthy and safe for our patients .... and caregivers. It's an important way to protect our protectors."

While Health First originally maintained a total of 81 permanent negative pressure rooms across its four hospitals, system leaders working hard to predict what effect a potential surge of COVID-19 patients in our community might have on our system quickly built in a plan to increase those numbers. In fact, Davis and his team had a plan in place within 24 hours of the decision to create more of these specialized room.

"We knew very early on that as COVID-19 was beginning to track toward the U.S., we would need to ensure these negative pressure rooms were developed, constructed and ready for any surge that hit our communities," Davis said. "Within 24 hours of approval, we worked with our construction contractor to begin work at Health First's Holmes Regional Medical Center, with plans also in effect for our other hospitals."

Davis and his team, in a matter of just a few weeks, created a staggering 210 additional negative pressure rooms - 92 rooms at Health First's; Holmes Regional, 74 at Viera Hospital, 36 at Palm Bay Hospital and eight at Cape Canaveral Hospital ... bringing the total negative pressure rooms from 81 to 291 across the four hospitals.

According to Davis, the $2 million project - while accomplished quickly and efficiently - is far more than just changing the air flow in one or a handful of rooms.

"First, it all starts and ends with an amazing and cohesive team - across many organizations - for which I am so incredibly proud and thankful for. We had dozens of talented and dedicated professionals who came together. The Health First team alone had 40 people working on the projects, and then include our major contractors Batson-Cook, BCER Engineering, Coastal Mechanical, and a number of small sub-contractors - totaling well over 75 personnel," Davis said. "This project is not as simple as just putting some equipment or an air purifier in a room and turning it on. In order to work, you essentially need to create an entirely new central air conditioning unit - which involves hundreds of feet of new, larger ductwork, and thousands of feet in electrical conduit. In addition, you need the specialized air scrubbing machines. In the case of Viera Hospital, for instance, we required six different crane lifts to move the new equipment on to the roof. In the case of Holmes Regional Medical Center, we were able to move the same type of equipment into some unused patient rooms. But we were able to do all of this at each hospital in record time and well in advance of any surge in our community."

Since you can't see air, how do patients and caregivers know the negative air flow is working in their room and on their floors - keeping everyone safe from the invisible COVID-19 virus?

"We installed magnahelic gauges that actually measure and digitally show the air quality levels. It's a visual peace of mind for everyone."

So, what happens once COVID-19 is history and becomes a resident in the pages of history books instead of a deadly resident within our country?

"We change everything back to the way it was," Davis said. "And we'll do that just as quickly as we constructed them before. This was an amazing learning experience about how we can plan for and create a plan for the worst-case scenario - whatever that may be. In the process, we also learned and gathered an incredible amount of new information and ideas that will help us as we begin construction on an entirely new Cape Canaveral Hospital. We truly were able to take a bad situation, find a solution for the 'what-if,' and translate what we learned into creating a better healthcare facility for the future."