The pandemic has accentuated the importance of ventilation systems in maintaining safe indoor environments for hospital staff and patients. It forced many healthcare systems to modify their ventilation system temporarily to protect patients and staff from the risk of COVID-19 infection. Ventilation systems that were not designed to handle 100% outside air operation could not be modified to operate in that manner and those that were designed to operate on 100% economizer struggled to maintain temperature in the spaces during the warmer days. Whether this helped in reducing the infection rate or not, it illustrated the real need for the hospital system to develop a ventilation strategy for a possible full airborne pandemic.

This session will present the systematic approach to providing a resilient and pandemic-ready ventilation system for healthcare facilities. It will compare what is anticipated to be required in future code versions and what are current best practices and standards that should be considered for implementation.