IIT Ropar -DMC Ludhiana designed Containment Box for protecting frontline healthcare workers
Kanwar Inder Singh/ royalpatiala.in/ Chandigarh
Coughing, Sneezing or aerosol generating procedure in COVID-19 patients leads to spread of heavy viral load among health care workers (HCW) and in spite of using PPE and taking appropriate precautions HCW gets infected with COVID-19 due to which higher than normal infection rate has been noted among them.
There is a need to use multiple methods to reduce risk of infection in HCW. Major transmission of virus to healthcare worker is through the respiratory route which may happen due to coughing, sneezing or aerosol generating procedure required during the treatment of these patients such as Intubation, suction, accidental disconnection of ventilator circuit with endotracheal tube, Non-invasive ventilation or nebulisation. Ideally these patients need to be put up in negative pressure isolation rooms. But the volume of patients is too high during COVID-19 like pandemic to place them all in isolation rooms. And converting all isolation rooms and ICUs to negative pressure room is costly and cannot be done immediately.
Dr. Ashish Sahani from IIT Ropar along with Dr. Vivek Gupta and Dr. G.S Wander from Dayanand Medical College & Hospital (DMCH) Ludhiana have jointly developed an aerosol containment box that can be manufactured out of readily available materials.
This can be quickly made out of commonly available resources such as wood, thick PVC sheet, Velcro and pasting and fixing materials. This box has a design that can allow it to be converted into a negative pressure chamber by connecting the vacuum from the wall-gas supplies, readily available in most hospitals. The aerosol particles are passed through a micron level filter before being passed out to atmospheric air which are standard fittings in most hospital vacuums. This box has been tested at DMCH for its aerosol containment capability. Patient comfort has been validated through volunteers lying with the box over their heads for more than one hour. They didn’t feel claustrophobic and their oxygen saturation levels remained normal throughout the test. The advantage of this design is that it can be made and deployed very easily by hospitals themselves without depending on any external supply chains many of which are broken due to lockdowns around the country.
Dr. Sahani, Dr. Gupta and Dr. Wander hope that this design shall be adopted by hospitals in order to provide additional layer of protection to the healthcare workers working at frontlines of fighting the COVID-19 pandemic and they are willing to offer help for quick adoption of this technology
April, 27,2020
