Hospitals are noisy. Pagers bleep, loudspeakers blare, equipment hums, visitors chatter. In that constant din, staff have to communicate and patients have to recover. Quieter hospitals would bring relief to all their inhabitants.

Over the years, the World Health Organization (WHO) and other bodies have recognized hospital noise as a problem and set standards in the hope of mitigating it. But in hospitals, saving lives and treating patients top all other priorities.

Walls, floors, and other surfaces must be kept germfree, which means they must be easy to clean. The smooth, hard materials that abound in hospitals reflect sound around corners and doorways. Powerful, usually noisy, ventilation systems are needed to filter, cool, and heat the air. Alarms and pagers have to alert staff wherever they are, whatever they're doing.

Despite the obstacles to tranquility, reducing hospital noise is feasible. In a recent paper, Ilene Busch-Vishniac and James West of...

You do not currently have access to this content.