care & love
When a hospital or care home faces an outbreak of an infectious disease, one of the most effective infection control strategies is cohorting. But cohorting is about far more than simply placing patients in the same room. The right patient care equipment plays a central role in making cohorting safe, efficient, and humane. In this article, we explain what cohorting means, why it matters, and how the right equipment helps care teams keep cohorted patients comfortable while protecting everyone else.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), cohorting refers to the practice of caring for more than one patient in the same designated place by the same designated staff. In practice, facilities typically divide patients into groups: those presumed negative, those presumed positive, and those confirmed positive. By keeping these groups physically separate, facilities reduce the chance that a healthy patient becomes infected in shared waiting areas or through close contact with staff.
Cohorting is usually considered when single rooms are in short supply and two or more patients share the same confirmed infection. It is also used during periods of service pressure, such as winter, when multiple patients may present with different or multiple infections. In all cases, patients who are at increased risk of infection, such as those who are immunosuppressed, should not be cohorted with others.
One of the core principles of infection control is that reusable equipment should be dedicated to a specific isolation room or cohort area. When each cohort area has its own set of equipment, from nursing beds to monitoring devices, the risk of transferring pathogens between groups drops significantly. Equipment that is shared must be decontaminated before use on another patient, and in cohort areas the frequency of decontamination should be increased.
Moving an infectious patient through a hospital creates risk. Portable equipment minimizes patient movement and allows care to be delivered at the bedside. During the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, radiology departments set up mobile digital x-ray machines outside the emergency department so that suspected patients could be imaged without entering shared waiting areas. The same principle applies to everyday care: the more care that can be delivered inside the cohort area, the lower the risk of cross-contamination.
Every time a patient is moved from bed to chair, or from one department to another, there is an opportunity for contamination. Multifunction nursing beds reduce the need for transfers by allowing most daily care to happen in bed, including back lifting, leg lifting, left and right turning, and even in-bed toileting. This keeps patients within their cohort area and reduces both the workload and the exposure risk for staff.
Automated care equipment, such as washing care robots, can handle bathing and cleaning tasks that would otherwise require close physical contact. By reducing the number of hands-on interactions, this type of equipment helps protect both patients and caregivers, which is especially valuable in a cohort area where staff movement between groups should be limited.
For care facilities planning or operating cohort areas, a few categories of equipment matter most:
Cohorting is a proven strategy for controlling the spread of infection, but it only works when the right equipment is in place. Dedicated, portable, and automated patient care equipment reduces patient movement, minimizes cross-contamination, and protects both patients and caregivers. Whether you are planning a cohort ward or reviewing your current infection control setup, investing in the right nursing beds, patient transfer devices, and automated care equipment is one of the most practical steps you can take.