Effect of physical partition height on medical staff exposure in a barn-integrated operating room

Abstract

The barn-integrated operating room (BOR), is defined as an operating room where multiple surgical operating tables are located in the same room, and this type of operating room has an advantage of full and efficient use of medical human resources. However, contaminants (i.e., surgical smoke) will inevitably flow from the surgical zone to other zones, and thus increase the exposure risk of the staff. Such exposure risks have not been analyzed, and there is still a lack of study on measures to avoid mutual interference between different surgical zones remain unmentioned so far. Therefore, a numerical investigation is conducted on the difference in exposure risk of surgeons and circulating nurses in the BOR and COR (conventional operating room, which is an operating room with only one surgical operating table), and then identified the significant potential of physical partition with different heights to reduce infection risk. The results show that the personnel exposure risk in the BOR is higher than that in the COR, especially for the circulating nurses. When a physical partition is mounted on the supply air inlet, the inhalation concentration of surgical staff can be reduced evidently, whether there is one contaminant releasing area or two. In addition, to minimize the risk of personnel exposure in different surgical areas, the partition height is recommended to be 0.3 m–0.9 m.