Anterooms & Negative Air Machines: Protect Against Airborne Pathogens

Ensuring the safety of both patients and healthcare staff from airborne pathogens is a challenge that no medical facility takes lightly. It’s why medical centers exist — to help patients become and stay safe and healthy. However, creating the ideal environment for rest and healing is extremely difficult in the real world. With a revolving door of patients, medical staff, visitors and a busy schedule packed full of surgeries, operations, construction work, renovations, maintenance projects, and a hundred other factors, modern medical facilities are often up against serious obstacles.

Thankfully, facility managers are not alone in their commitment to health and safety. In today's blog, we will explore powerful tools and equipment you can employ to keep pathogens, dust, and debris from spreading into high-risk areas. We'll also talk about how these solutions are highly effective and easy to manage and set up — saving you both time and money. Sound interesting? Dive deeper by downloading our comprehensive pricing guide at the end of this post. 

Preventing Airborne Pathogens 

An airborne disorder is any disease that is caused by microorganisms transmitted through the air. These include bacteria, viruses, and fungi. At any level of education on the subject, it is widely understood that air quality matters. More than that, poor air quality can intensely affect infection in a healthcare setting. In simple terms, if you let germs float freely in your healthcare facility, you risk spreading disease to many patients and staff members. When vulnerable patients and hardworking medical teams are at the mercy of the facility’s air quality, it is more critical than ever to prevent dangerous airborne pathogens wherever possible. 

Empower Your Facility With High-quality Equipment

In a medical facility of any size, safety procedures and precautions are simply not enough to make up a complete infection control strategy. Patients, staff, visitors, and anyone else who may be coming into your facility bring germs and potential infection with them everywhere that they go, so it’s up to facility managers to have tools and equipment in place that will help keep vulnerable patients and hardworking staff safe from harm. 

Two of the most powerful and effective machines that can support your infection control strategy are anterooms and negative air machines. They work beautifully individually, but they create a powerful barrier against the spread of disease when used as a pair. 

Anterooms

An anteroom is essentially a small room you enter before accessing a larger space. In a hospital context, an anteroom serves as a buffer zone between contaminated areas and treatment rooms. Whether the source of contamination is dust from construction work or pathogens from a patient with an infectious disease, an anteroom is a frontline tool for controlling these hazards. These can be set up quickly and deployed around your facility easily — usually in just a few minutes from installation to usage. Anterooms' ease of use, maneuverability, and flexibility make them indispensable in a hospital environment, especially when infection control is at stake.

Negative Air Machines

Negative air machines and scrubbers, however, perform the essential task of air filtration that anterooms do not, creating positive or negative air pressure in various settings, including medical facilities. Their ability to powerfully create a “negative air” space means that they can ensure air is only flowing into a space rather than out of it. Why does that direction matter? Let’s say that an isolated patient is dealing with a highly infectious disease. Without a negative air machine, air is able to flow freely from the hallways of the facility into the room, but also vice versa. This is a recipe for the spread of infection. A negative air machine allows facilities to control the airflow and only allow air to come into an infected space, and either be redirected outdoors or filtered through a medical-grade High-efficiency Particulate Air (HEPA) filter and recycled safely back into the facility. 

A Perfect Match of Machinery

One of the most highly effective tools against dangerous airborne pathogens is negative air pressure. Using a negative pressure containment field in your facility can prevent potentially harmful pathogens from escaping an airborne infection isolation room. Essentially, air will only flow into the space rather than out of it. However, a negative air machine cannot do its job effectively without a contained space to manage the airflow from room to room. That’s where an anteroom is the negative air machine’s best friend. 

Using The HEPACART® AnteRoom Classic and the HEPAFORCE® AIR Negative Air Machine from HEPACART in tandem takes your infection control measures to a whole new level. The HEPACART AnteRoom Classic effectively seals off a room. At the same time, the HEPAFORCE AIR Negative Air Machine redirects or scrubs the air within, creating an environment where both patients and healthcare providers can breathe easier. The combination offers unmatched protection against the spread of airborne pathogens.

More Than Just Disease Isolation 

While anterooms and negative air machines are incredibly effective at managing infection control when used together, the same holds true for construction and renovation projects as well. With dust and debris flying around as a result of machinery working in a medical center, the use of negative air and anterooms can prevent a major disturbance — and potential infection — to the rest of the facility. Particularly, while patients with suppressed immune systems are involved, keeping dust and construction debris contained is critically important.

Take Safety to a New Level With HEPACART

HEPACART takes great pride in providing effective equipment to aid your infection control strategy and doing so in a way that you can depend on for years to come. We understand that these tools are an investment, and our commitment to quality and excellence ensures that you can confidently use our products daily. 

When you choose a HEPACART AnteRoom Classic paired with our industry-leading AIR Negative Air Machine, you are investing in a high level of safety and effectiveness in your approach to infection control. Our AnteRoom Classic is not only highly effective at reducing the spread of Healthcare-associated Infections (HAIs) but is also reusable, saving your facility money and reducing waste. 

As for the HEPAFORCE AIR Negative Air Machines & Scrubbers, these tools go far beyond just filtering the air — they ensure that the air your staff and patients breathe is as clean and safe as possible. Whether you opt for the addition of a HEPA filter or not, your patients, staff, and everyone else in your facility will be significantly safer from the spread of infection with this equipment in place. 

Get Started with Our Free Pricing Guide 

Don't compromise on your facility’s safety. Now that you understand how an anteroom like our own AnteRoom Classic paired with a negative air machine like the HEPAFORCE AIR can dramatically improve the air quality in your facility, why not take the next step? Download our pricing guide to explore your options for elevating your infection control measures today.

The stakes are high, but you can safeguard your medical facility against airborne pathogens with the right equipment and strategies. Make the smart choice — choose HEPACART.