ACEP COVID-19 Field Guide

Hospital flow — how patients and health care workers (HCWs) move through the hospital to receive and provide care, respectively — should be optimized, especially when providing care to patients with infectious diseases. The goal of hospital flow optimization is to protect HCWs, so they can keep seeing patients rather than becoming patients themselves. The hospital flow optimization process starts by examining how respiratory diseases move within a hospital and then designating areas as screening areas and lower-, moderate-, and high-risk treatment areas (Figure 5.1).

Figure 5.1 How COVID-19 moves within a hospital. Credit: Jung K, Li R, Ng A, et al. How hospitals can protect frontline healthcare workers from COVID-19: lessons from successful model countries. Published April 2, 2020.