With limited hospital capacity around Texas, rural hospitals have had to convert entire wings of their facilities into makeshift COVID wards with limited equipment. Thanks to a team from Texas Tech, and a special air scrubbing device, one rural hospital can now safely house COVID patients.
Outside of Collingsworth General Hospital, engineering students and professors spend the morning fitting air ducts to windows along the side sectioned off for COVID patients. The task gets trickier when they reach the third window.
“That last one over there is the one with a patient,” Dr. Jeff Hanson said. The hospital has two COVID positive patients.
Today the team is transitioning six hospital rooms to negative pressure rooms with an air scrubbing device they designed. One device sucks the air out of three rooms, cleans it and releases it outside so it doesn’t infect anyone else.
“The way they’re doing that currently,” Hanson said, “Is just boxed fans in the windows.” The white boxed fans suck the air from the room and outside into the open air. “So any passersby those windows, could potentially get exposed to COVID,” he said.
Dr. Hanson is a lecturer in the school of mechanical engineering at Texas Tech. He tasked a team of seven senior design students with creating an air scrubbing device for this particular hospital.
Sarah McLean is one of the seven students who assisted in designing the air scrubber and the only one present for the installation—everyone else is volunteering. She spends the morning sawing through slabs of metal, which will help shelter the devices from extreme weather.
This project was initiated by the West Texas 3D COVID-19 Relief Consortium, a collaborative effort between departments across the entire Texas Tech circuit. They identify needs related to pandemic relief that they can solve. Throughout March and April, when Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) was running short, the team utilized their 3D printer to design and print face shields for frontline workers.
Jnev Biros is part of the consortium. Part of her job is figuring out the needs of the community and working across departments to get these projects going. “Essentially every COVID patient needs to be kept in a negative pressure room,” she said. Biros says that after visiting six rural hospitals the need for negative pressure rooms was immediately apparent.
“These hospitals are not designed to have the kind of an infrastructure to take care of COVID patients,” Biros
said. Since hospitals around Texas are so over-capacitated, she explained that these rural hospitals need to take of these patients.
Collingsworth General Hospital is in Wellington, Texas, about 100 miles from the closest large hospital in Amarillo. They’re the first to get the donated air scrubbers installed. Two other rural hospitals are in line. Candy Powell the hospital’s administrator said they’re worried about the potential spike from the holidays. But having these air scrubbers will help them work safely.
“We’re just so thankful to Texas tech for coming in and helping us make these adjustments to our rooms,”
