Flooring’s important role in sound reduction

In recent years, much time and effort have been devoted to enhancing the wellbeing of patients and staff by updating hospital air-conditioning and re-thinking interior design. Despite these improvements, however, hospitals continue to be affected adversely by growing problems with excess noise. The impact of noise on patient care and staff wellbeing has been well documented for over a century. Florence Nightingale stated: ‘Unnecessary noise, then, is the most cruel absence of care which can be inflicted either on sick or well.’ Yet despite the need to control acoustics in clinical settings, hospitals are experiencing increasing problems with noise. Researchers at John Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, in the US, analysed noise measurements taken at a variety of hospitals throughout the world over a 50-year period. Their findings revealed a clear trend for rising hospital noise levels since 1960, showing an increase, on average, of 0.38 dB per year for daytime levels, and 0.42 dB per year for night-time levels. Average sound pressure levels in hospitals have increased from 57 dB in 1960 to 70 dB in 2006, with a rise in average night-time levels from 42 dB to 60 dB.

Well in excess of WHO guidelines

These statistics are significant to UK health estates in two ways. Firstly, these decibel levels are well in excess of the World Health Organization’s recommended maximum level for a good night’s sleep, which is up to 30 dB background noise, with no peaks over 45 dB. The actual noise levels have consistently fallen outside the recommended guidelines over the past 60 years, and continue to worsen. Secondly, the results collected by the John Hopkins team demonstrated ‘remarkably little variation given that the results are for widely different sorts of hospitals and medical units’. Even taking into consideration different designs and architecture, and the varying clinical activities carried out in these spaces, ‘the problem of hospital noise is universal’, rather than the result of circumstances in individual facilities. This is a widespread problem affecting healthcare estates of all types.