B.C. doctor develops COVID-19 vacuum chamber to protect hospitals

A doctor at B.C.’s Abbotsford Regional Hospital has come up with an innovative way to keep staff and patients safe when working with COVID-19-positive patients.

Anesthesiologist Dr. Curt Smecher worked with the hospital’s maintenance staff to design the negative pressure vestibule, an airlock-like chamber that now guards operating rooms at the Abbotsford, Surrey Memorial and Royal Columbian hospitals.

The vestibule combines two important medical concepts that are at odds with one another during the pandemic.

Hospital operating rooms are usually kept at a raised air pressure, so that air flows out of the room and no germs can flow in and infect a patient.

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Patients with an infectious disease, on the other hand, are usually kept in a room with negative pressure, ensuring potentially contaminated air doesn’t flow out and infect others.

The negative pressure vestibule combines those two concepts.

“We put an anteroom in front of the operating room, we put a fan on that with a filter and we put it on suck so it became a negative pressure area,” he said.

“It’s been characterized as very much like a vacuum cleaner that just vacuums up the virus and just gets rid of it, so anything coming out of the operating room doesn’t go into the corridors, instead it goes into the filters and away from anyone who could potentially get infected.”

When Smecher and his colleagues initially pitched the idea, he said they were told it couldn’t be done.

Smecher said the idea took about a week to win approval from Fraser Health, with crews getting quickly to work afterward — a process he called “light speed” within a health-care bureaucracy.

That speed, perhaps, was driven by the high stakes of the situation.

“We put this in place because of what we were hearing from China and from Italy. It was in anticipation,” he said.

Smecher said he’s only aware of the system being in place at three hospitals, but that the concept is now in the hands of the province which could expand its use.

— With files from Ted Chernecki

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