Recommendations for the transformation of patient rooms into isolated patient rooms in the process of the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

Covid-19 is the last pandemic in today's world that reached a global scale and its impact has lasted long. In order to prevent the spread of Covid-19 and improve the treatment process, interest in hospital design and in-hospital transformation has increased worldwide. Since Covid-19 is not believed to be the last infectious health threat for communities around the world, it is of great importance to study existing hospital adaptations and work on obtaining more planning and design strategies for treatment and wellbeing areas. For this reason, in this study it is aimed to make constructive recommendations on the basis of in-space planning and mechanical ventilation, which can be applied in hospital transformations for pandemic processes. In this direction, published guidelines and literature studies for hospitals to prevent the spread of infection have been examined. Afterwards, the steps that can be applied in hospital transformations have been explained with the case study on the design plans of a private hospital in Turkey. Since it is required to make in-hospital space planning (separation and transformation of spaces, interior zonning) and ventilation (filtration, zoning of mechanical ventilation) in harmony in order to ensure infection control in hospital conversions, interdisciplinary work was carried out at the stage of transformation planning and interviews were conducted with architects and engineers specialized in hospital designs. As a result of the study, suggestions completed that could play a role in ensuring the consistency of mechanical and architectural planning in order to successfully complete hospital transformation practices to prevent the spread of infections in pandemic processes. As the transformation scenarios in this study are performed through a typical Turkish hospital room, it has been shown that the transformation steps can also be adapted to other hospitals.