Survey Evaluation of the Indoor Environment Quality in a Large Romanian Hospital

• Main Authors: Cristiana CROITORU, Andreea VARTIRES, Florin BODE, Angel DOGEANU
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: National Institute for Aerospace Research “Elie Carafoli” - INCAS 2013-09-01
• Series: INCAS Bulletin
• Subjects: field survey; indoor environment quality; healthcare facility; indoor perceived comfort
• Online Access: http://bulletin.incas.ro/files/croitoru__vartires__bode__dogeanu__v5_iss_3_full.pdf

The medical units represent a challenge for the building services engineers who are often put in difficulty to ensure the indoor optimal conditions. The destination variety of the indoor environment in such buildings and the different internal thermal loads lead to discomfort zones, for all involved users. The requirements imposed by standards lead often to dissatisfaction for the users: while some of the medical staff asks for low temperatures, others feel discomfort and often the patients have thermoregulatory problems due to this non-homogeneity of thermal conditions found.Several sets of survey studies were made in a large emergency hospital located in Romania of 1070 beds. Medical and non-medical team participated in this study regarding the indoor quality from different work-zones of this hospital. The zones studied were: internal medicine, cardiology, gastroenterology, hematology, neurology, neurological recovery, the emergency unit, and also functional and auxiliary areas: dietetics, administrative, statistics, etc.All the queried persons had to response to a 15 minutes questionnaire, where local and global comfort questions were asked, in addition to specific characteristics like gender, age etc.The results have shown high differences from one zone to another and more of that, high differences between the categories of personnel. Uncomfortable thermal sensations, lack of fresh air and important level of polluted air, noise or lack of space are just some of the problems met in hospital environment.