Jeremy Ackerman

Hospital noise and staff performance

Hospitals are often noisy and not conducive to staff performance. Indeed, many staff believe that noise negatively affects their professional performance, quality of work, and ability to concentrate and communicate. Research shows that increased stress and annoyance, increased rates of burnout, and reduced occupational health are a few of the possible effects of hospital noise on staff. However, only a few hospital studies have directly linked noise to job performance. Results show that noise and distractions can potentially deteriorate mental efficiency and short-term memory and increase errors, but other studies have shown no significant effects. Alarm fatigue is also of concern, as staff may tune out, silence, or disable alarms because they are desensitized or exhausted by them. This paper will discuss what is currently known about hospital noise and staff performance and what questions remain. On-going studies relating the sound environment to staff performance in medical simulations will also be high...

Relating patient physiology to the hospital sound environment.

Sounds in hospital wards have previously been linked to physiologic changes in patients including sleep disturbance, variation in vital signs, and impaired pain management. However, relationships between sound measurements and variations in physiologic measures remain somewhat unclear. This presentation will discuss a pilot study that focuses on the relationships between acoustic measurements and patient physiology in a Swedish medical‐surgical intensive care unit. Sound measurements as well as physiologic measures including heart rate, oxygen saturation, respiratory rate, and blood pressure were recorded simultaneously for 24‐h periods in 18 patients. Several different analyzes were performed to assess the relationships between the acoustic results and the patients’ physiological measurements. The data demonstrated a statistically significant relationship between the recorded physiological responses and acoustic measurements. The results build upon previous results to further elucidate the relationships ...

The healthcare acoustics research team: Bridging the gap between architecture, engineering, and medicine

Healthy soundscapes are paramount to the missions of hospitals: patients need to sleep and heal without environmental stressors; staff, patients, and family need to communicate accurately but privately; staff need to be able to localize alarms and calls for help. This talk discusses recent findings from the Healthcare Acoustics Research Team (HART), an international, interdisciplinary collaboration of specialists in architecture, engineering, medicine, nursing, and psychology. Members of the HART network are actively engaged in research in the United States and Sweden, having worked in more than a dozen hospitals and a broad range of unit types including adult and neonatal intensive care, emergency, operating, outpatient, long-term care, mother-baby, and others. Highlights will include projects relating noise and room acoustic measures to staff and patient response in addition to studies evaluating impacts of acoustic retrofits. Results show that effective hospital soundscapes require a complex choreography of architectural layout, acoustic design, and administrative processes that is only beginning to be fully understood.

Emerging findings from the Healthcare Acoustics Research Team (HART)

Hospital patients, staff, and visitors need healthy soundscapes: patients need to sleep and heal without stress; staff, patients and family need to communicate accurately but privately; staff need to hear alarms and calls for help. Unfortunately, many hospitals are noisy and stressful places. Although there is growing and strong evidence that the hospital soundscape is problematic, there are many remaining questions and obstacles. This presentation will discuss recent case studies and findings from the Healthcare Acoustics Research Team (HART), an international, interdisciplinary collaboration of specialists in architecture, engineering, medicine, nursing, and psychology. HART is actively engaged in research in the United States and Sweden, having worked in a dozen hospitals and a broad range of unit types including intensive care, emergency, operating, long-term patient care, mother-baby, and others. HART seeks to advance the understanding of how various aspects of the hospital soundscape impact occupant...

Effects of noise on emergency department staff.

The hospital sound environment is complex. The impact of a poor soundscape is becoming an increasing concern for both staff and patients, particularly in emergency departments (EDs). While there is growing evidence of the negative impacts of a poor soundscape, there is surprisingly little rigorous evidence about exactly what acoustic characteristics impact hospital staff. This paper presents a detailed acoustic study of two EDs in Atlanta, GA. Equivalent sound pressure levels (Leq), speech intelligibility index (SII), spectral distribution, and other acoustic metrics were calculated for four locations in each emergency department over 24 h. Results show Leq’s between 50–63 dBA, which severely exceeds the 30 dBA guideline level set by the World Health Organization. Additionally, no area observed held a “good” SII rating. These acoustic measurements will be compared to results of staff questionnaires focusing on staff stress and job satisfaction. Findings from this work will advance the understanding of how...

Psychoacoustic measures and their relationship to patient physiology in an intensive care unit.

Many researchers have attempted to characterize the soundscape of hospital wards using traditional acoustic metrics. These traditional metrics, such as average sound level, are readily measured using sound level meters and have been the primary results reported in previous studies. However, it has been shown that these traditional metrics may be insufficient in fully characterizing the wards. This is a continuation of a larger study that evaluates the relationship between hospital soundscape and the effects on the hospital occupants in a medical‐surgical intensive care unit. The previous study in this series showed statistically significant relationships between patient physiology and the traditional sound level meter metrics. This current study aims to expand beyond traditional sound level meters and use digital recordings to describe the ICU rooms with psychoacoustics metrics. Thus, a comprehensive catalog of these metrics for ICUs is compiled and presented. In addition to descriptive results with these...