By Troy Cowan, IUVA Healthcare/UV Working Group
A most memorable and productive workshop on “Achieving Consensus on GUV in Public Spaces” was held in Atlanta, June 6-8, 2023. By all accounts, the event may have had the greatest concentration of GUV expertise in the world, with 69 in-person and 50+ virtual attendees from 13 countries. The attendees represented more than 70 companies, seven government agencies, 17 universities and three nonprofits. This was the first road-mapping workshop to identify the issues, objectives and plans needed to implement GUV in public spaces to combat disease transmission, and it was truly amazing.
The genesis of the workshop goes back to IUVA Americas 2022 in Cincinnati, Ohio, where more than 260 attendees from over 15 countries participated. The event concluded with the IUVA Healthcare Task Force leading an interactive discussion on the latest trends in GUV technologies for healthcare, involving more than 80 attendees from the federal government, NGOs, academia and industry.
This truly groundbreaking event constituted perhaps the greatest gathering of healthcare-focused GUV expertise in decades, knowledgeable about the many industry associations and their pivotal roles in developing and applying GUV to help the nation’s fight against this and future pandemics. The gravitas in the room was immense, the results profound, and it was readily felt, acknowledged and appreciated by all, especially the Federal representatives who had never seen an industry come together like this before. From this came a call for industry-consensus action plans to be developed as the next step, and the Achieving Consensus on GUV in Public Spaces workshop was designed with that objective in mind.
Workshop Outcomes
Those who attended and contributed, in-person and virtually, accomplished amazing things. In just 2 ½ days, working collaboratively in multiple roundtables, attendees set the stage for:
- at least two – and as many as four – major task force initiatives coming from the Industry Devices/Technologies and Regulatory roundtables. These are depicted in Figure 1, which shows how the task forces are organized.
- multiple podcasts, webinars, articles and conference presentations to be presented and published with the help of our sister associations and IUVA’s UV Solutions, per plans from the Public Education and Communication roundtable.
- a renewed effort to reach out to other associations and organizations to join these initiatives, engaging them in standards development and public education efforts, and expanding the collaborative base of expertise. More than 20 new candidate organizations were identified and are being explored.
- development of a curated resource list of relevant standards and guidance in the field, to be hosted on the soon-to-be-launched IUVA Education Resource Center.
- an immediate action item to enhance and update IUVA’s GUV-related webpages and website materials. This was initiated within two to three days after the workshop concluded and will be ongoing as the above action items unfold and develop.
- development of over-arching proceedings for the workshop to memorialize the above-mentioned efforts and the results produced by the roundtables, to be proposed for publication as an official NIST-sanctioned Technical Report, which would be included as a referenceable resource in the Library of Congress catalog.
This is a massive amount of production – enough material and content to keep everyone busy for three to five years (as shown in Figure 1). Attendees did good work. Please take a bow!
Experts on Hand
As a lead-in to the working session, attendees were briefed by several nationally recognized experts in GUV and related fields. The IUVA’s deepest thanks go out to these keynote presenters:
- Dr. Jim Malley (University of New Hampshire)
- Dr. William P. Bahnfleth (Pennsylvania State University)
- Dr. Vito A. Ilacqua (US Environmental Protection Agency)
- Dr. Matthew Meyer (Occupational Safety & Health Administration, US Dept. of Labor)
- Dr. Stephen Anisko (US Food and Drug Administration)
- Dr. James N. Bernardini (National Aeronautics & Space Administration)
They certainly set the stage for a most productive workshop. As their slides are released to us, they’ll be posted on the workshop’s Agenda webpage (https://iuva.org/2023-GUV-WS-Agenda) for use and reference. Again, many thanks to those who educated and inspired attendees with their knowledge, experiences and insights into the science, benefits and uses of GUV.
Next Steps
The event facilitators and their roundtable teams are continuing to refine action plans and schedules for executing the outcomes noted previously. Updated plans will be posted and updated on the IUVA website (https://iuva.org/2023-GUV-WS-Round-Table-Results) as they become available. These plans must evolve and adapt to new developments and discoveries so, of course, this is just a start. The task force will need continued involvement to make these plans come to fruition. To that end, a web-based survey on the workshop has been sent out to get attendees’ feedback to help organizers digest this workshop’s results and plan for future activities. As those results become available, they too will be posted to the workshop website.
Attendees and others interested will be updated on progress on these efforts during the monthly Healthcare/GUV conference call, which is held every third Thursday at 2 pm ET. To receive an invitation and notice of those calls, click the Respond/Join button on the Healthcare/GUV Working Group website (https://iuva.org/healthcare-hai-task-force) to be added to the invitee list and receive an e-calendar event notice.
The overarching goal for the workshop and these ongoing initiatives is to further the development and implementation of GUV technologies in public spaces to reduce the risk of spreading infection. Please join in. These goals can’t be accomplished without the industry’s support and participation.
Acknowledgements
IUVA and the Healthcare Task Force are most grateful for and humbled by the hospitality and support given to this workshop by ASHRAE in the unrestricted use of its World HQ facility. It was an invigorating environment and the perfect venue that made the Workshop’s success possible.
The event also would not have been possible without the diligence and hard work of the Roundtable Facilitators: Dianne Poster, Cameron Miller, Dustin Poppendieck, Joy Dunkers, Phyllis Posy, Dan Spicer, Wendy Walling, Rick Martinello, Gabe Arnold and Ashish Mathur (see their biographies at https://iuva.org/2023-GUV-WS-Conveners). Thanks to their efforts, the peer-to-peer roundtable sessions were highly successful in distilling the latest trends in infectious diseases, GUV technologies and healthcare needs, and in planning ahead to meet the needs of the GUV sector over the next five to 10 years. IUVA and the Healthcare Task Force offer the deepest gratitude for their efforts, both during the workshop and those ongoing, as the work continues to bring the workshop results to full completion and final delivery.
