Insights & Solutions

As part of the noise toolbox, in this issue brief you will learn about how excessive noise can negatively impact patients and staff in the hospital environment, ways to improve patients’ perception of sound, and low-cost, medium-cost, and high-cost design strategies that can reduce noise.

HCAHPS scores related to noise in the hospital environment are typically among the lowest. Acoustic intervention packages implemented by healthcare organizations are often a combination of built environment and operational measures.  

Learn about: how one hospital’s emergency room pilot project increased patient satisfaction, the standards developed post-pilot to decrease noise transfer to other areas of the hospital, and why having design changes on paper may not be enough.

Learn about: how St. Mary's Hospital targeted noise reduction goals for their cardiac care unit, about onsite sound measurements that informed material selection, and about design changes that resulted in reduced noise from the highest sources of sound.

Learn about: the key noise issues facing the industry today, design strategies that can be implemented to mitigate noise, the problems with spaces that are too quiet.

Learn about: why hospitals starting to care more about noise issues, new metrics for noise measurements and why measuring noise in unoccupied rooms is important and holistic approaches to sound reduction.