Hampton Roads hospitals try to muffle ill-advised noise

Wheels and hinges squeak. Vacuum cleaners roar. Badge-readers beep. Voices blare over loudspeakers.

Hospitals keep getting noisier, studies show. At their loudest, they can reach the levels of a rock concert or a jet takeoff.

The sounds may be more than just irritating, too: Some research indicates that patients need more pain medication and longer hospital stays when their surroundings are excessively noisy.

“When you’re a patient, and you’re in those rooms and that becomes your home, it’s every little sound that we may take for granted,” said Debra A. Flores, president and administrator of Sentara CarePlex Hospital in Hampton. “Some come to the hospital, and they just tell you right off the bat, ‘I’m not expecting to get any rest here.’ ”

Nationally, fewer than 3 out of 5 patients give top ratings to hospitals for quietness at night.

It’s the lowest-scoring of 10 measures on a patient survey conducted by the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Starting next year, a hospital’s scores on those surveys, along with other quality measures, will figure into its Medicare payment rates.

The most recent survey results, posted in August, show rising overall satisfaction with Hampton Roads hospitals. The percentage of patients who said they’d definitely recommend the facility increased for nine of the region’s 13 hospitals, compared with a year ago.

Most also drew better reviews for their quietness. CarePlex and Bon Secours Maryview Medical Center in Portsmouth were among the best-rated.
Health leaders are listening carefully.

“When you’re using the same cart everyday, you sort of become deaf to what’s going on with it,” said Lauren White, Maryview’s service excellence director. “We discovered that was what was happening, that we needed to take a look at all of those noise elements from the patient’s perception.”

At Maryview, that meant upgrading to a quieter floor-polisher and no longer using it at night. Nurses started communicating with special cellphones, which reduced the number of overhead pages. And nurse managers began keeping an eye on noisy carts and other equipment.

Even little details made a difference, White said. “If we simply lowered the lights in the hallways at 9 o’clock, it naturally encouraged passers-by to quiet their voices and reminded the nursing teams and the physicians, it’s nighttime.”

Sentara CarePlex leaders acted on a suggestion from a patient: They lowered the volume on the scanners that read staff members’ badges as they enter a medication room or unit.

“There was no reason to hear the beep,” Flores said. “You can look at the light and see that it’s green and it’s OK to go in.”

White noise machines also seem to help. So does the conversion to electronic medical records – it allows nurses to do documentation in patients’ rooms rather than congregate at nurses’ stations.

“We’re told even when we’re not sick, how important it is for us to get adequate sleep,” Flores said. “When you’re sick, you’re compromised even more. So I’d say the same rules would apply and then some.”

Amy Jeter, (757) 446-2730, amy.jeter@pilotonline.com