The Deadline Rapidly Approaches: Negative Air Pressure Rooms in Healthcare

One such regulation about to be lifted is the COVID-19 National/State Emergency Hospital Blanket Waiver: Conversion of Standard Patient Rooms to Negative Pressure Isolation Rooms (Indiana State Department of Health). Let’s start with what this is referring to – negative pressure rooms, also known as isolation rooms. These are rooms where the air pressure inside the room is lower than the air pressure outside of the room, stopping contaminated air or dangerous particles inside the room from flowing into the air outside. Non-contaminated air flows into the negative pressure room, while contaminated air is sucked out with mechanical systems. Filters clean the contaminated air before it is pumped out of the space. Negative pressure rooms help keep infectious illnesses away from other patients, staff, and visitors.

So, what does the waiver do? It allows facilities to convert non-isolation rooms into isolation rooms during the declared National and State COVID-19 Emergency without meeting all the requirements outlined in the Facility Guidelines and not requiring the hospital to submit waiver requests or plan designs for these rooms. In laymen’s terms, the waiver made it easier for medical facilities to create negative pressure rooms without having to go through pre-approval, as long as they sent notice to the Indiana Department of Health (ISDH) and requested an inspection. The waiver states that “this emergency waiver is time limited to the duration of the COVID-19 public health emergency. If a facility wishes to make the negative pressure rooms permanent, the room(s) must be submitted for plan review and designed to the FGI 2018 Edition requirements for negative pressure rooms.”