Poll: What Can We Actually Do About Hospital Room Noise?
January 17, 2012
- By ArtsieApsie, via Flickr
Fierce Healthcare reports this week on the latest findings about hospital room noise: ”hospital rooms can be as noisy as chainsaws, according to a new study [subscription required] published this week in the Archives of Internal Medicine….The average noise level in patient rooms was close to 50 decibels….The noise disruptions mostly come from staff conversation, roommates, alarms, intercoms and pagers….Loud hospital rooms are associated with clinically significant sleep loss among patients and even may hinder recovery.”
So, nurses (and patients, MDs, others): can anything be done about this? Does your hospital do anything? Take our poll, and also of course feel free to leave a comment on this post.—JM, senior editor
We have been visiting relatives in the hospitals of late and have not noticed it very noisy and no longer here anything on the intercom as we did years ago. Do any hospitals use sound proofing?
[...] But this unit was a good example of those that are as “noisy as chainsaws” (see our recent post on this). I was two doors down from the nurses’ station and I could hear every conversation, [...]