We are frequently asked to provide acoustic services with regards to healthcare or medical settings.
The services that we deliver might not be obvious ordinarily, but they do have a big impact on day to day soundscapes. These include but are not limited to the following:
Where external plant is being introduced, be it wall mounted, floor mounted, or on a flat roof, it is often necessary to consider how this might impact another part of the building or alternatively, a nearby residential property. We would be required to consider when the plant might run and how it might inadvertently impact others. Specialist noise modelling software may be used to determine how sound might propagate across a site.
Where there is internal ducting or air handling plant which helps move air around a building/space, it is often necessary to consider the rooms being provided with fresh air and ultimately, the fans/ductwork needed to remove the air in the room.
Working closely with mechanical and electrical (M+E) consultants and carrying out duct work calculations, we would determine if a Noise Rating level is achieved inside a specific room for example. There are specific Health Technical Memoranda (HTM-08) which dictate how noisy such mechanical services shall be. Where this might not be achieved, we may require silencers for example.
Another issue relating to ductwork is where adjacent rooms are supplied with the same air, but require silencers or cross talk attenuators within the ductwork to prevent sounds or indeed speech from one room inadvertently entering another room.
When considering new medical or health care settings, the same HTM criteria applies and acts as guideline for the internal noise levels to be achieved. It is therefore necessary to measure externally and ensure that the building designers have sufficient mass within their design to keep environmental noise outside. It is critical to work closely with the building designers and the M+E consultants to check that any assumptions made are shared and understood by all of the project team. Opening windows for example will easily allow the external soundscape into a room and it may well exceed the HTM 08 criteria for a particular room type and require a specialist ventilation solution. Equally, opening a window might well allow sensitive conversations to be overheard and requires consideration from the outset.
Within a medical and health care setting, there is also the expectation that a conversion you might be having with a GP or medical professional, is in fact private and only between you and them. Such conversations should not therefore be intelligible in adjacent spaces such as waiting rooms for example due to an ill-fitting door or a weak partition.
We will often be required to mark-up drawings to show improvements to walls, corridors and even door sets to ensure that speech privacy is maintained within the room spaces. This might apply to a consultation rooms and counselling rooms for example.
Whilst the above items are often considered at a design stage, we are also called into premises retrospectively to review indoor acoustics.
Investigations of noise transfer between rooms is also relevant and being able to identify how and why the sound energy is able to move between the rooms and why conversations are heard where they should not be. This can often require working outside of normal operating hours to ensure that business continuity us not impacted by noisy sound testing.
Another area where we have also been involved is telephony and call centres. Call handlers clearly need to be able to understand what is being told to them over the telephone, but in a situation with poor room acoustics, it could well be the case that as more and more people are speaking, they all increase their vocal effort in order to be heard. Before too long, this can result in an unpleasantly raised noisy environment. Engineering a solution to introduce absorption into the built environment will often assist matters, as well as looking at seated booths, headsets etc.
