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 occupants, how to best measure and quantify these aspects, and how to translate results into evidence-based-design. Taken as a whole, these studies provide new insight into how to create healthier hospital acoustic climates.