This is one of the

scientific Americans 60 second science.

I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

Hospitals can be extremely noisy places.

In fact, quietness is one of the lowest rated categories on national surveys of hospital quality.

And...

The situation is getting worse rather than getting better.

Eileen Bushvishniac, an acoustician and president of Beaogrin consulting.

She talked about hospital noise at a session during the Acoustical Society of America meeting,

this week in New Orleans. Bush-Fishniac says she and her colleagues

have tested speech intelligibility in hospital halls and at nurse stations and

they found poor or marginal scores across the board.

In fact, the speech communication and noise problem is so bad that most hospitals in the

U.S. have eliminated the ability to phone in pharmaceutical orders.

You now must deliver them in writing because they were getting too many errors.

So how to calm the cacophony? She suggests more closed doors to give

patients peace and quiet or instituting or continuing so-called quiet times. When nurses

interact less with patients they turn the lights down and keep voices low,

and installing more acoustic absorbing tiles. Finally, she recommends fewer audio alarms.

Now that alarms frequently are gathered centrally at nursing stations, it seems less necessary

to have them also ringing at the bedside of patients. And if we could turn those off, we would remove some of the most distracting sounds from the environment.

The idea wouldn't be to eliminate all bedside alarms,

...