Isolation (Health Care)

In health care facilities, isolation is one of several measures used in infection control to prevent communicable diseases from being transmitted from a patient to other patients, health care workers and visitors, or from outsiders to a particular patient, called reverse isolation. Various forms exist, in some of which contact procedures are modified and in others the patient is kept away from all other people; in a system devised and periodically revised by the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, various levels of isolation apply one or more formally described precautions, most commonly used when a patient is known to have a contagious viral or bacterial illness, supported by personal protective equipment such as gowns, masks and gloves and engineering controls such as positive and negative pressure rooms. Isolation should not be confused with quarantine, the compulsory separation and confinement of people who have potentially been exposed to an infectious organism to prevent further infection should it occur, nor with biocontainment, the laboratory biosafety containment of highly pathogenic organisms; when isolation is applied to a whole community or geographic area it is called a cordon sanitaire, and reverse isolation applied to a community to protect its inhabitants is called protective sequestration.