Residential Care

Caring for the most vulnerable patients in our community.

Air Sentry will create Ultra Clean Air within residential homes with minimal disruption to staff, patients and without complex installation requirements.

Residential care homes are the forgotten front line
of our medical support network.

Often staff working in these areas are dealing with the most vulnerable patients without access to high grade technical systems and protection.

At the same time, the main hospital network often decants patients to free up capability, so there is a real risk of infections arriving with a new patient.
This is in a similar manner as the risk that exists in accident and emergency departments.

1. Air Dilution

Air is theoretically changed a number of times an hour to maintain room air as dilute.

This works well when it has been implemented correctly as a low level of any disease in the air is difficult to catch. The inlet should be in one ceiling corner, pushing ‘fresh air’ over the room and patient area with the outlet in the bottom opposing corner. This means the air change occurring is diagonal across the room, and the air change is actual, it really is changing the air 12 times an hour.

Historically though, very few rooms have air ducting installed in the optimal way. The inlet tends to be in one ceiling corner and the outlet is mounted also on the ceiling, meaning the air flow being measured is across the ceiling. In this situation the actual air change rate may far below what the hospital thinks it has achieved.

How do viruses like Coronavirus move around Residential Homes?

Well run residential care, with residents being treated with excellent infection control routines, including shielded isolation, have still seen disease ‘move’ around the care home environment. Sometimes this has occurred at a rapid and devastating pace. Coronavirus has been a wild fire, spreading unchecked in some homes, despite excellent care and control measures.

The most likely reason for this in well run homes, is the asymptomatic release of droplet nuclei through respiration or through CPAP devices being used for sleep apnea. These sub 5um particles can remain in non ventilated room air for unto 28 days without touching a surface and travel up to 148 metres or more via micro convection currents.

How to create Infection Control in Care Homes

Finding the right solution.

The ideal response would be to fit an Airsentry® system to each room but at the moment this would be too costly. Fitting lower grade units may help but if these are below an assured HEPA14 grade, they may well not offer the protection claimed. Likewise many claims are made for plasma, UV-C etc but all of these systems have a weakness, exposure time. You need air to go through the system for them to work, as you also do with HEPA, and Air Sentry® is the only system available that generates assured whole room air currents whilst being regulatory compliant.

Our solution is one that works, whilst still offering the option of having a system per room, if required. Most residential care homes have corridor areas and we are able to make the corridor equivalent to the airlock used in ICU isolation areas. A single Air Sentry® unit can maintain corridor air as Ultra Clean™. As the corridor is at the same pressure as individual residents rooms, each time a door opens, air exchange occurs via diffusion. The higher particle concentration of the room air flows into the corridor area, as occurs already with the current transmission vector.

This means that a single system can maintain a corridor as Ultra Clean™ but also reduce the biological load in individual residents rooms, without needing to be stationed in each one individually. This helps prevent disease transfer around the care environment, whilst also reducing viral loading or biological loading to staff, many of whom do not have respiratory protection.

The system used can be fixed or mobile, the latter making for greater versatility and improved access for servicing.

Air Sentry Product Brochure

Read full product specification and case studies.

Protecting patients, Protecting staff, Protecting Life.