Insights & Solutions

Join us for a discussion of how one academic medical center infused evidence-based design principles into break lounges for nurses and then utilized cutting-edge technology to study their impact. You will hear from research and design professionals as well as nursing senior leadership on lessons learned regarding the role of cultural influences and the impact of the built environment on nurse respite.  

This webinar will present an overview of the Legacy Emanuel Medical Center garden research project. For this project, The Center for Health Design awarded Legacy Health and Quatrefoil, Inc. its 2018 Evidence-Based Design Touchstone Award at the highest Platinum Level. Attendees will gain an understanding of the impact of an evidence-based design (EBD) process to create a hospital garden to reduce stress in three different user groups, learn the positive effects of a garden on different hospital populations, and see how the garden is used in daily programming to serve all hospital populations.

This webinar explores: Dr. Robert Zarr, a DC Pediatrician and founder of Park Rx America will discuss how sterile work environments in clinics and hospitals are contributing to doctor burnout and elevated levels of stress and anxiety among patients.  Jack Sullivan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Plant Science and Landscape Architecture at the University of Maryland.  Professor Sullivan’s recent research focuses on the healing potential of nature in the city.  

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.

This list of resources is made of up of articles, books, policies, organizations, and more, related to noise  Use this list to learn more about this topic.

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.