Emergency Response – Negative Pressure Isolation Hospital Shelters
As part of our efforts to help fight the global COVID-19 crisis, Agile Vehicle Technologies is acting as a distributor for the world leading Blu-Med Response Systems Negative Pressure Isolation (NPI) hospital shelters. In the fight against Ebola and other viruses, the use of NPI facilities was really critical to manage the outbreaks and as COVID-19 is a droplet spread respiratory virus, NPI is an effective way to help fight the virus and protect health workers.
Blue Med NPI shelters are self-contained deployable medical hospital units and are available in 10 to 100 bed facility units that can be rapidly setup. The 10 bed BLU-MED shelter module occupies a space of 20’ x 32.5’, a 40 bed shelter is around 56’ x 74’ and the 100 bed facility is around 140’ x 74’ and any number of 100 bed facilities can be used where capacity demands as they are self-contained units.
The NPI hospital facility has filtration system is an integrated Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) Super System to effectively control all three elements of IAQ: particles, biologicals and gas phase (Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs)) for superior air quality. The system consists of a high efficiency Germicidal pre filter with a sterile sweep UVC light, a blower and a final HEPA filter. The filtration unit is installed between a standard BLU-MED Environmental Control Unit (ECU) and the shelter end panel to filter 100% of the return air when positive or negative pressure is required.
The special V bank configuration of the BLU-MED filtration unit captures more airborne particles than typical single stage pre-filters. Its unique configuration is extremely effective against dangerous sub-micron size particles as well as moulds, bacteria, and viruses. The filtration system panels capture and hold dangerous pathogens, allowing the sterile sweeps focused beam of UVC Light to kill and inactivate even highly resistant organisms such as anthrax and mould. The filtration system also helps remove unpleasant odours and provides effective protection against gas phase contaminants such as VOC’s. The final filtration stage removes 99.97% of particulates .3 microns or greater in size per CDC guidelines.
The NPI filtration system comes complete with a pressure monitoring and alarm system together with a full Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) system as part of the ECU.
The NPI filtration system in combination with the ECU provides 24 air exchanges per hour (ACH), exceeding CDC guidelines. The system filters 100% of the return air and has a standard capacity of 2000 cfm. Removal of ambient volatile organic carbon compounds (VOC’s) is accomplished at a minimum rate of 30% per pass.
The system cleans return air with a non-ionizing, polarized media electronic air cleaner coupled with an Ultra Violet C (UVC: 200-280nm UV light) emitter. The UVC emitter has an oscillating parabolic reflector to focus the intensity of the light onto the filter media for complete coverage. The emitter is installed in sufficient quantity so that the media of all the air cleaners will be repeatedly swept with the focused beam of UVC. The UVC lamp has a high output lamp that produces UV light in the 185nm range. The electronic pre-filter air cleaner will remove 98.6% of all contaminants .3 microns and greater and does not ionize airborne particles. The final stage of the filtration package is a HEPA filter and is rated at a minimum of 99.97% efficiency. The HEPA filtration system includes a differential pressure gauge to monitor HEPA filter pressure drop to indicate dirty filter status. The filtration system can provide negative pressure isolation or positive pressure isolation while supplying clean filtered air. An adjustable positive or negative pressure range.
A unique feature of the BLU-MED NPI system is the ability to scale the size of the isolation cells within the shelter facilities. This scalable feature provides a measure of redundancy when caring for smaller numbers of patients requiring isolation. It allows for segregation of potentially infectious patients and non-infectious patients within the same shelter if necessary while maintaining negative pressure throughout the entire shelter.
BLU-MED NPI facilities come fully kitted out with ward beds, privacy curtains, lights, internal electrical kit and sub-flooring and the necessary NPI and HVAC electrical units. The facilities can be configured with triage reception units and anteroom to provide additional ward capacity or as full NPI facilities. These facilities could also be setup inside the new temporary hospitals that are being introduced to provide vital isolation capabilities.
If you would like to find out more about how Blu-Med NPI hospital facilities could help in the fight against COVID-19 contact us.
