The importance of cross-contamination prevention in the architectural design phase in hospital environments

Abstract

The Civil Engineer always seeks to reconcile structural security and the lowest cost when designing a work; however, when the work in questionis a hospital unit, attention should also be paid to the disposal of the sectors of that, so it provides the lowest possible level of contamination. For this work, nine documents were used as a parameter of study and analysis in order to establish a lineage to be followed in the sectorization of the hospital environment, since no technical notes or re-gulamenting standards were found regarding reducing the hospital infection of the environment as a whole as much as possible. Then an investigation was made on site in a hospital in the Region of Amazonas, Brazil and from this visit was elaborated a plan of sectorization of its ground floor, in order to exterminate foci of cross contamination. Bin this plant, another was created by rearranging the sectors and showing that, in the new sectorization, the foci of contamination can be drastically reduced only by changing some sectors of place, thus altering the flow of people in the dependencies of this hospital floor. The COVID-19 pandemic reinforces the warning about the care of cross-contamination, one of its greatest forms of transmission. Thus, at the end of this article it was found that there is a great literary vacuum referring to hospital projects that prevents cross-contamination; there is no specific standard for hospital sectorization, except for some sectors governed by specific norms; it was also noted the little interest of municipalities in promoting a standard that regulates this sectorization, because one of the documents referring to this dates almost thirty years ago.