IAQ in Hospitals - Better Health through Indoor Air Quality Awareness

摘要

Quality air is fundamental to people's health and well-being. Indoor air quality is an important issue from both a social and economic point of view. Continual advances in medicine and technology necessitate constant reevaluation of the air-conditioning needs of hospital and medical facilities. The application of air conditioning to health facilities presents many problems not encountered in the usual comfort air conditioning design. Hospital air conditioning assumes a more important role than just the promotion of comfort. Studies show that patients in controlled environment generally have more rapid physical improvement than do those in uncontrolled environment. Air quality at hospitals needs special precautions during design and maintenance stage to prevent infections from spreading. 50% of all illnesses are either caused by, or aggravated by, polluted indoor air. The main objective of this paper is to critically review and summarize the available information about IAQ particularly in health care industries. Symptoms of poor IAQ in a building, contaminants causing poor IAQ, features of HVAC systems for a hospital for better IAQ are briefly discussed in this paper. Strategies to improve indoor air quality in hospitals and the current international research to improve indoor air quality are reported in this paper. Based on the extensive interactions with different stake holders of a hospital it is concluded that maintenance of proper indoor quality in a hospital needs meticulous team work among the various members of the hospital at various stages .