Hospital Noise Spoiling Patient's Sleep

Anyone who has been sick can appreciate the joy of a good night's sleep, but in a large institution like a hospital, there are necessities of running the establishment that can disturb a patient's peace. All the more so with all manner of electronic equipment, cell phones, alarms, intercoms and such like, that produce sounds to wake the dead. However the association between noise disruption and sleep patterns had not been studied in great detail.

A report published in Annals of Internal Medicine goes some way to solving the issues with Orfeu Buxton, a neuroscientist at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, and his team looking into the problem in depth. As Buxton aptly puts it "It's nerve-wracking enough to be a hospitalized patient, and there's a lot of racket at night."

Patients agree: with one of their main complaints in a recent hospital survey being night time noise pollution but obviously there are practical considerations involved and as Jeremy Ackerman from Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, a member of the international Healthcare Acoustics Research Team puts it :

"We don't necessarily just have to make (the hospital) quieter ... We need to be particularly careful to avoid designing into systems and into the architecture very disruptive sounds ... we have a general sense that loud sounds, interruptive sounds all create an environment that is likely to slow healing."

Research has shown that background noise in a hospital can spike up to 80dB about as loud as a chainsaw. Obviously that kind of racket would wake most people up, but to make changes a more detailed evaluation was needed. With this in mind, Buxton's team took 12 healthy subjects and played sounds while they slept. The recordings were mainly taken from hospitals and included things such as IV pump alarms, people talking, a plane flying overhead and a laundry cart rolling down the hall. Using Encephalographic studies of the patients, and by using established sleep criteria, the subjects were tested during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and non-REM stages 2 and 3.

In all they found that alarms and voices were the worst offenders, which makes sense, since alarms are designed to attract attention and the importance of what is being said tends to attract a person's attention more than the hum of an AC unit or a door closing. The brain can filter out those kinds of sounds as unimportant........

I work in a hospital. Yes, it is noisy. I'm in the ICU and typical days the unit is crawling with doctors making their rounds, dieticians, speech therapists, physical therapists, occupational therapists, case manager, social service, food service delivering food trays, housekeepers cleaning - all needed services to help the patient heal.

Most X-rays are done with portable machines in the unit so that's additional noise. All patients are on IV's and hooked to heart and vital sign moniters. There is almost always an IV beeping because it's empty or the patient bent their arm which stopped the med from running or something else wrong. The moniters beep if the blood pressure is too high or low, the oxygen saturation drops, the heartbeat gets tachy or too low or something more serious.

The beds are made with bed alarms that are set to go off when a patient gets too close to getting out of bed. Many patients are high fall risks and the alarm will alert us before the patient is out and up on their feet. There's another alarm to wake everyone up.

Intubated patient needs a cat scan or MRI, we transport him or her down ourselves to get it. Need respiratory therapist with us and that can get a little noisy and distracting for other patients as we push the heavy bed and equipment by them. Double the chaos when we have one of those huge specialty beds for the (ahem) larger patients.

The phones ring constantly. The xerox/fax machine is not very quiet. And then somebody from a med supply company comes by to have an inservice right outside the rooms for the latest fecal collection bag or something. They have to have most of those for the staff in the unit because the nurses cannot afford to be away from their patients, nor do they want to.

Then there's the families and friends who want to visit their loved ones. They aren't, for the most part, noisy or disruptive. However, as God as my witness, I've watched as a group of them will surround Grandpa's bed and get down in his face, poke him to tell him over and over for a solid half hour or more that they want him to get better and he needs his rest and try to sleep. If his eye blinks they rush up to the bed again, start poking him and asking him what he needs (meanwhile Grandpa has an intubation tube down his throat and can't talk) and this lasts another half hour. Then they will get back to their chairs and yak about life. Sometimes there will be 4-5 or more visitors at a time and we no longer can force a limit of 2 at a time.

We get alot of patients in isolation and when the nurses are in their rooms all gowned and gloved up, they yell out to the tech (me) when they need supplies. My ears hurt when I get someone screeching "I need this. I need that." Can only imagine how the patient feels.

After 8 or 12 hours of this extra sensory stimulation, when I get home, I want to be alone. I sympathize with those who are sick and can't get away from all of this.

But with all the advances in medicine and cures and cares, how can this be avoided? I don't have an answer. Many hospitals have been working hard on avoiding mistakes, reducing hospital acquired infections and fixing things that cause more harm to patients. This may be the next thing that they address.

Recovering in the Intensive Care room, it wasn’t the noise that bothered me (nurses playing Monopoly all night was distracting, but let ‘em have their fun), it was THE D@#^ CLOCK WAS RIGHT IN FRONT OF THE BED. 2:30AM ... tick ... tick ... tick ... tick ... tick ... tick ... tick ... tick ... tick ... tick ... tick ... tick ... tick ... tick ... tick ... tick ... tick ... tick ... tick ... tick ... tick ... tick ... tick ... tick ... tick ... tick ... tick ... tick ... tick ... tick ... tick ... tick ... tick ... tick ... tick ... tick ... tick ... tick ... tick ... tick ... tick ... tick ... tick ... tick ... tick ... tick ... tick ... tick ... tick AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMAKEITSTOPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

My 81 year old father just had quadruple bypass a few months ago...he spent quite awhile in ICU. I was flabergasted at the constant noise and the seemingly obliviousness of the staff....waking up a very sick man to do the most innocuous things....they wouldn’t even try to lump things together to minimize the disruptions to his sleep.

Between the sleep depravation and the affects of anesthsia, he began to hallucinate. I truly believe the sleep deprivation significantly slowed his recovery and nearly killed him. I wonder how many folks in weaker conditions, who die, maybe not directly from sleep deprivation but as a contributing factor. i would say quite a few.

I think there is a lot of room for improvement in that area of hospitalization.

I have a dream where one day we can dictate how we are treated by being allowed to make informed decisions about our own care even saying that we want to be left alone if our vitals are normal and we are sleeping peacefully. I think sleep is the best medicine in most cases.

rant off....

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