Insights & Solutions

Learn about: how excessive noise can negatively impact patients and staff in hospital environments, the various ways to improve patients’ perception of sound, and the specific low cost, medium cost, and high cost design strategies that can reduce noise. 

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.

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.

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.  

The following are compiled from research literature, case studies, interviews, and other materials to provide an overview on the topic of noise.  

This tool provides healthcare designers and professionals with ideas on how to address the issue of noise in facility design.

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 Florida Waterman built patient rooms to reduce noise, how patient satisfaction scores improved as a result of room design changes, and how the team studied the impact of the new design strategy.