Hospitals across the NHS are rethinking ventilation as estates teams face growing challenges in ensuring safe air for patients and staff. Andrew Carnegie, Managing director at Air Sentry, says proactive monitoring and closed-loop systems are essential to transforming clinical environments from lagging to leading.
Back in 2000, I asked a simple but uncomfortable question: Do we lead, or do we lag? At that time, it was becoming clear that clinical ventilation systems across the NHS were not always performing as expected. Rooms that should have been safe were not consistently so. Systems that were assumed to be protective were, in practice, falling short.
The framing still matters today. To lead is to operate a closed-loop system, one that measures performance continuously and adjusts in real time. To lag is to rely on open-loop assumptions — designing, installing, and then intermittently checking, hoping that the system behaves as it should.
HTM 03.01, the key document guiding ventilation in healthcare premises, is undoubtedly well-written and important. Yet fundamentally it is guidance that lags. It relies on design assumptions and periodic validation.
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