The COVID-19 pandemic presented numerous challenges across healthcare. Dentistry was particularly severely affected due to the ubiquity of aerosol generating procedures. This presented serious risk to service provision and the training of dental students. Improving the ventilation of the dental hospital was recognised as a key mitigation measure to allow dental activity to safely resume.
In this talk I will cover the challenges encountered in planning a large capital project during a pandemic in the face of rapidly changing guidance. I will discuss some the issues of retro-fitting ventilation into an aging dental hospital, including the solutions that we identified. I will also share lessons learnt to inform future projects.