Gaelan Komen
Policy and Research Manager, Policy Connect
Nathan Wood
Managing Director, Farmwood
Atmospheric monitoring technologies can bring healthcare into the home and improve patient outcomes.
Where should a patient pathway start? When sickness is caused by the household environment, healthcare must begin at home. Indoor environments are incubators of illness; the Covid-19 pandemic can be considered a network of poorly ventilated indoor spaces, and poor-quality housing is increasingly being linked to ill health and premature death.
Household environments and ill health
The death of two-year-old Awaab Ishak in December 2020 from mould in his home is a tragic illustration of the lethality of the home environment — and the need for cross-sector collaboration to improve health at home.
Awaab’s family lived in a mouldy and inadequately ventilated one-bedroom flat in Rochdale and had little support to tackle the toxic air indoors. Housing services, despite visiting the home, stated they didn’t recognise the level of risk to health, and the coroner found information gaps between local and health services.
With various local services entering homes, many professionals — from care workers to gas engineers and housing surveyors — have a role to play in ensuring health at home.
Household monitoring should be a fundamental
component of the patient pathway.
Need for widespread household monitoring
Mould is easy to spot, but to assess and address the invisible cocktail of airborne toxins indoors, atmospheric monitoring technologies are essential.
Innovative smart monitoring systems have recently been developed, which can pinpoint pollution levels, identify sources and provide actions to improve air quality – but these may be difficult to widely introduce. To assess risk in vulnerable homes like Awaab’s, frontline workers should be equipped with wearable monitoring devices.
For effective care and better outcomes, household monitoring should be a fundamental component of the patient pathway, enabling rapid testing, assessment of health risk and evidence-based referral for healthcare or home upgrades.
How to ensure indoor air quality
The Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty has highlighted household air pollution as an urgent public health priority. However, a lack of data frustrates policy action while a lack of policy hinders data collection.
We call on the UK Government to take the initiative and institute a national indoor air quality observatory. Such systematic monitoring — as is in place in schools, homes and care settings in France — can uncover vital unknowns about indoor air pollution and guide action to tackle hazardous living conditions.
The Government is committed to improving the quality of social housing through ‘Awaab’s Law.’ To successfully address hazards like mould, inequalities in exposure and ill health, the Government must join up health and local public services through systematic air quality monitoring in homes.
