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Title	New Biocontainment Unit Ready to Take on Highly Infectious Diseases
Sponsor	Johns Hopkins Medicine
URL	http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/strategic_plan/news.html...
Email	mcallaw3@jhmi.edu
Details	In the midst of panic over the spread of the Ebola virus in West Africa last fall, hospitals and health care systems around the country – including the Johns Hopkins Health System – quickly prepared to safely care for patients with the disease. During the Johns Hopkins’ ongoing Ebola preparations, it became clear that a designated space – away from other clinical areas – was needed. A team of architects, clinical engineers, physicians, nurses and infectious disease experts have worked feverishly for the past seven months to plan for and transform a deactivated clinical unit at The Johns Hopkins Hospital into a state-of-the-art Biocontainment Unit. The new unit recently opened and is prepared to safely care for patients with highly infectious diseases, without compromising the health and safety of other patients, families and care teams, according to Lisa Maragakis, medical director of the unit and the health system’s senior director of health care epidemiology and infection control. Although a unit of its size would typically care for 20 or more patients, the Biocontainment Unit only has a maximum capacity of three patients at any given time. This extra space helps regulate the flow of the care team in and out of patient rooms, allowing staff members to don and doff the required personal protective equipment and care for patients without contaminating themselves or others. The unit also includes an on-site laboratory, capability to perform routine surgical procedures as well as showers and clean-in/clean-out anterooms for health care providers. The unit’s ventilation system is separate from the rest of the hospital and two pass-through autoclaves allow for the safe and effective handling of highly infectious medical waste. The unit’s most important feature is the roughly 100 clinical and nonclinical staff members who have self-selected to undergo rigorous training to safely care for patients with all types of highly infectious diseases, noted Brian Garibaldi, associate director of the unit. When the unit does not have patients, it will be used for education, training and further research on infectious diseases. View a video about how the new Biocontainment Unit was constructed and then take a virtual tour of the unit. Also, read an article about the biocontainment unit in Dome.

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