Care home design
l Adopt different thinking on ventilation and air flow to control virus movement.
l Introduce adaptable and flexible partitioning that can be erected in hours.
l Minimise shared surface contact. l Give more space both inside, e.g. corridor width, and outside, e.g. gazebos and terraces, for safe, human interaction.
Separating and controlling Separating and controlling these different groups is the first step in minimising cross-contamination from new sources to a care home. Physically keeping all visiting personnel into one area while protecting all resident personnel in another – with minimal and managed interface - can be arranged with often nominal adaptation to the lobby areas. The addition of temperature checkers
and washing stations with no-contact taps and plenty of no-touch hand sanitiser completes the picture. A few care home operators are also
trialling facial recognition software that screens people as they arrive at homes. This allows them to identify team members, read their temperatures and trigger the automated doors to allow entrance to the building if their readings are clear to achieve a contactless, entry protocol. In a new design, incorporating a
spacious lobby at the heart of small ‘pods’ of living areas in the surrounds would be a simple and effective design barrier to infection. For outside visitors, an online booking
system can be used to manage and limit numbers, while scanning QR codes are a swift method of track and trace. Additional visitor spaces or rooms that introduce Perspex screens or to prevent contact are already being used successfully to create safe visiting pods. These specially created partitioned
spaces have an airtight glass screen to ensure the safety of residents, their
families and care staff. Visitors enter and exit from outside the home to minimise the risk of infection. Residents access the pods from a different door inside the homes, while an intercom system allows residents and their visitors to speak with each other easily and both sides are deep cleaned between each visit. In larger care homes, the bedrooms
may be sufficiently spacious to allow visitor access if appropriate. In addition, there are services, such as laundry, that pose a high risk of cross-contamination, that can be hygienically taken offsite minimise spread.
Quarantine is key New residents, rapidly transferred from hospitals or elsewhere without testing, made a catastrophic impact to many a care home this year. It will be an essential part of every care home operation that all newcomers can go through a pleasant, dignified and welcoming quarantine at the start of their stay in fit-for-purpose buildings or areas with a dedicated team of staff to assist. Newcomers might be brought in on a
weekly basis so that they can undergo their term as a bubble together, avoiding the need for the soul-destroying isolation
that so many have had to face. Any in-house infections should be
quarantined in their own room to avoid the horror for many of new, unsettling surroundings. This might require the ability to set up an airtight, pop-up lobby area that allows staff to change PPE clothing or floor-to-ceiling zip-lock facilities. These allow each bedroom to be separable and air-tight from the corridors and communal areas, which require a review of the traditional approach to ventilation flow.
Flexible, adaptable design As we have seen in other areas such as restaurants, hotels and offices, adaptable spaces are becoming the future. The ability to respond quickly and change the layout has shown many new advantages and these can be true for the care home too. It includes a series of adjustable walls and screens that would be used to segment an open-plan area into various dedicated spaces. Floor plans will look different in the
future so that flexibility and space allocation can be adjusted. Everyone will want the ability to quickly modify and scale their operations to cope with different levels of contagion again in the future.
Ventilation flow Evidence shows that the virus can be spread in the air via suspended aerosols so it is critical ventilation systems are configured to support healthier indoor environments. Conventional air conditioning systems, for example, simply recirculate and recondition the majority of the air extracted from living environments in order to avoid the penalty of excessive heat loss when expelling it. However, as there are no filters
available that can prevent the passage of virus particles below one micron in diameter, this arrangement serves to
December 2020 •
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