A challenge to the evidence behind noise guidelines for UK hospitals

Background

Teams assessing hospital noise against international guidelines regularly find that noise exceeds perceived safe levels in clinical settings. The care of sick people may be inherently noisy but recent efforts to tackle the problem propose a wider scope to identify sources and qualities of noise as well as more precision with noise recording.

Aims

We sought to challenge the scientific evidence cited in the four major documents pertaining to hospital noise in the UK to clarify if evidence of harm from noise included in guidelines is available, contemporary and of high quality.

Methods

Our team of hearing-health clinicians, acoustic scientists and acoustic engineers have conducted a narrative scoping review focused on critically appraising four of the most cited guidelines against which noise is measured in healthcare settings in the UK.

Results

There is a lack of high-quality evidence for commonly accepted consequences of noise cited in current guidelines.

Conclusions

The current evidence base for noise guidelines in a healthcare setting is largely based on subjective heterogeneous and inconclusive research. Whilst reduced noise is not disputed as potentially beneficial for patient care, further hypothesis-driven research and interventions assessing the benefits or outcomes of any such intervention should be sought to produce high-quality evidence of relevance on the clinical coalface.