Abstract
Background:
Indoor air contamination in hospitals is a critical concern, as it can significantly impact the health of patients, staff, and visitors. Evaluation of air contamination helps the hospital administration in creating a safe environment for staff and patients.

Aim:
The goal of this study is to assess the microbial air contamination of 17 medical locations in and around AZ Zawiya city and to examine the antimicrobial sensitivity for the contaminating bacteria.

Methods:
A cross-sectional study was conducted in 17 different locations in four hospitals in and around AZ Zawiya city. From June first to end July of 2023. The tests were conducted by placing two petri dishes at each of the chosen locations, each petri dish contained an agar medium to help detect the contamination, and the type of bacteria causing this contamination. The samples were then transferred to Alfa Laboratories by using transport media. Isolation of bacteria was done based on cultural and biochemical profiles. Antibiotic susceptibility tests were conducted on all the samples that had pathogenic bacteria to determine which type of antibiotics the bacteria were sensitive to and which were resistant to. The antibiotic susceptibility tests were conducted by the disk diffusion test, which is the usual applicable method for assessing the antimicrobial susceptibility patterns for most institutions and The Chi-square test was performed to analyze the data statistically.

Results:
The contamination rate was 29.41% where only 5 out of 17 locations were contaminated with Staphylococcus aureus. The locations that were contaminated with Staphylococcus aureus are as follows. AZ Zawiya internal medicine department. AZ Zawiya obstetrics and gynecology department, Almutrad internal medicine department’s male observation room, Almutrad obstetrics and gynecology department, Almutrad testing and laboratory department, and the results show that Staphylococcus aureus was resistant to most of the 26 antibiotics tested. Samples from different locations had different percentages of resistance, where GYN ZMC had the least resistance to the antibiotics used in the study (69.23%) and GYN MGH had the highest antibiotic resistance (80.77%). The samples from the other three locations (IN ZMC, IN MGH, and LAB MGH) had the same resistance rates (76. 92%). The statistical analysis using Chi-Square test did not show any significant differences among these results at a p-value of p < 0.05.

Conclusion:
The results showed that only 5 out of the 17 locations were contaminated with airborne pathogenic bacteria, and all of them were Staphylococcus aureus. The S. aureus Samples were resistant to 13 out of 26 antibiotics tested, and only two antibiotics were 100% effective on these bacterial samples.

Key words: Bacteria; Antibiotics; Air contamination; Hospitals; Zawia city.