Insights & Solutions

In this webinar, Sarah Markovitz will outline the prevailing healthcare noise challenge—the conflict of the need to bring people together who need frequent contact, and the resulting distracting noise. She will then outline the potential negative impacts of noise on staff performance, satisfaction, and well-being and offer insights and strategies for how to mitigate those negative impacts. Finally, she’ll share  innovative ideas for restorative, high-performing inpatient unit workspace design that benefits both patients and staff.  

The built environment plays a critical role on the health and wellbeing of its inhabitants, including: the advent of the evidence-based methodology on disruptive innovation in healthcare design; biophilia as a baseline for the shift to our inordinate amount of sedentary time indoors; how to access color and light, and their misunderstood impact on an occupant’s experience; discussion of issues related to acoustical integrity of our environments; environments that encourage interaction, communication and the healing power of touch; and an assessment of how design impacts “life indoors” through a review of best practices.

Healthy soundscapes are paramount to the missions of hospitals: patients need to sleep and heal without unnecessary environmental stressors; staff, patients, and family need to communicate accurately but privately; staff need to be able to localize alarms and calls for help. There is growing research evidence of the potentially negative effects of poor soundscapes on hospital occupants. Explore recent findings from the Healthcare Acoustics Research Team (HART), an international collaboration of specialists in architecture, engineering, medicine, nursing, and psychology. 

The waiting room continues to be a major problem area in terms of patient and family experience, as well as organizational efficiency. Healthcare organizations struggle to accommodate high patient volumes and a variety of acuity levels, while patients and families deal with a roller-coaster of emotions, long wait times, and lack of privacy. The majority of research on the topic of waiting room design is based in case studies, which provide little generalizable evidence for further application.

From heightened anxiety and stress, to medical errors, to staff burnout, to HIPAA violations, that hospital noise is pandemic is well known. Ongoing efforts to reduce noise in hospitals, including the “quiet at night” campaigns, have limited success due to a misunderstanding regarding the characteristics of a restful environment. The auditory environment is the least controllable and the most pervasive, involving communications, technology, family dialogue, sounds of recovery and sounds of disease. This webinar provides both insights and frameworks for creating a healing, restful environment.