{"id":3256,"date":"2020-08-26T14:18:12","date_gmt":"2020-08-26T14:18:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/interhospi.3wstaging.nl\/how-to-reduce-hospital-noise-at-neonatal-units\/"},"modified":"2021-01-08T12:30:41","modified_gmt":"2021-01-08T12:30:41","slug":"how-to-reduce-hospital-noise-at-neonatal-units","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/interhospi.com\/how-to-reduce-hospital-noise-at-neonatal-units\/","title":{"rendered":"How to reduce hospital noise at neonatal units"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Hospital noise is an issue for babies born prematurely who are at high  risk when it comes to external influences such as noise. Their systems  are underdeveloped and they need as much sleep and rest as possible to  recuperate. This is one of the reasons why the Neonatal Unit at the  highly specialized Rigshospitalet hospital in Denmark, began cooperating  with the noise measurement company SoundEar this year. <\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>Not all sound is noise<\/strong><br \/> Staff at the Neonatal Unit stress that there is a difference between  what they call  good sound&#8217; and noise. The point being that not all  sound is noise, and not all sound should be eliminated. It is important  for the development of the newborns that they hear sound such as their  parents and siblings talking and singing to them. It is also important  that staff can communicate audibly in critical situations, and it is  inevitable that some medical equipment, such as respirators, are noisy.  What they do want to reduce is unnecessary sound stemming from alarms,  furniture, work flow and talk.<\/p>\n<p> <strong>Keeping parents in the loop<\/strong><br \/> An important part of the project is to keep parents informed about why  the noise meters are installed and not only focus on reducing noise, but  also inform them that they should still talk to their newborns and that  some medical care routines will result in a certain level of noise. One  way of going about this has been to develop a flyer to hand out to new  parents in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU).<\/p>\n<p> <strong>Reducing hospital noise through awareness<\/strong><br \/> The aim is to bring down hospital noise levels at the NICU through  installing noise meters in all rooms. Half of the noise meters are  anonymous white boxes which solely measure and collect noise levels. The  other half of the noise meters also have a display with an ear, that  lights up green, yellow or red, indicating the current level of noise in  the room.<br \/> Reduction in noise levels at the NICU is expected to be achieved through different layers of nudging:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li> The noise meters with displays should help staff and families become  aware of their own noise levels and change their noisy behaviour.<\/li>\n<li> The software helps staff become aware of when and where noise levels are critical and something should be done differently.<\/li>\n<li> The software sends out noise reports on a weekly basis via email to key  staff members who use these reports as a basis for further discussion  about noise at staff meetings.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p> <strong>Changing routines<\/strong><br \/> After having the SoundEar devices hanging in the NICU for a few months,  staff was asked to fill out a questionnaire about the perceived hospital  noise levels, and whether the SoundEar devices seemed to have changed  anything. 14 staff members, primarily nurses, answered the questionnaire  and 78.6 percent reported that the SoundEar devices had made them more  attentive to noise levels. The same amount reported to have changed some  of their behaviour because of the SoundEar devices.<br \/> The change that most staff members reported to have made, was to unpack  syringes and other types of medical equipment outside of patient rooms,  because they had noticed that the ripping of plastic made an unnecessary  amount of noise around the children. Others reported lowering their  voices and lowering the noise level of alarms as changes they had made  after the installation of the SoundEar devices.<br \/> Several staff members also reported to have seen an increase in parents&#8217;  attention to noise levels, and that they commented on noise to other  visitors and siblings, thereby spreading the attention to noise.<br \/>\n<br \/> <strong>Custom-made software<\/strong><br \/> All the noise meters transfer noise measurement data wirelessly to a  central computer, where it is accessible to staff through a piece of  software, developed specifically for hospital use by SoundEar in  cooperation with staff at the NICU.<\/p>\n<p> <strong>Jointly creating a noise measurement system<\/strong><br \/> An important part of the project was to create a system that would help  reduce hospital noise and become part of the daily routine at hospitals.  For SoundEar, this meant focusing on what staff needed and what their  everyday work life looked like and adjusting to that.<br \/> In the early days of the project, SoundEar viewed the software platform  as the main component of the system and something that staff should be  able to interact with daily. They should monitor noise levels just as  they were used to monitoring the health levels of the newborns.<br \/> To make the software as useful as possible, SoundEar conducted several  interviews with staff members. Very soon, it became clear that even  though nurses viewed reducing hospital noise as important, their focus  was on the critical medical care for the newborns and keeping them alive  and well. Their time was limited and they would not be able to  prioritize time from their busy schedules to consult a piece of software  that did not have immediate medical importance for the children.<br \/> Instead, they suggested that a few members of the staff should be  responsible for driving the hospital noise reduction, checking the  software and gathering insights for the rest of the staff to discuss at  weekly meetings. Along the way, the procedure evolved  into  auto-generated noise reports being sent to key staff members to be  discussed at staff meetings on a weekly basis.<br \/>\n <link http:\/\/www.soundear.dk _blank external-link-new-window>www.soundear.dk<\/link>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hospital noise is an issue for babies born prematurely who are at high risk when it comes to external influences such as noise. Their systems are underdeveloped and they need as much sleep and rest as possible to recuperate. This is one of the reasons why the Neonatal Unit at the highly specialized Rigshospitalet hospital [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6854,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3256","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured-articles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/interhospi.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3256"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/interhospi.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/interhospi.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/interhospi.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/interhospi.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3256"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/interhospi.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3256\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12727,"href":"https:\/\/interhospi.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3256\/revisions\/12727"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/interhospi.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6854"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/interhospi.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/interhospi.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/interhospi.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}