A review of hospital noise studies

Hospital noise concerns are on the rise due to detrimental health effects and the implementation of Value Based Purchasing, which affects federal reimbursements based on HCAHPS patient satisfaction scores. Because noise is one of the lowest performing categories in the survey, it is expected that demand for hospital noise surveys will increase. Therefore, it is useful to examine existing hospital noise measurement techniques to serve as a guideline for future work. This paper provides a summary of several noise studies of existing healthcare facilities conducted by Acoustics By Design (ABD) and others. The goal of the studies performed by ABD was to balance providing a comprehensive noise study (across multiple noise variation factors, such as time of day, and weekend and weekday conditions, department type, etc.) with providing a study that is time and cost efficient. We have found that this is best done through a combination of short term and long term measurements in close collaboration with hospital s...