Study: Noisy hospitals bad for patients

WASHINGTON -- Anyone who's had a hospital stay knows the beeping monitors, the pagers and phones, the hallway chatter, the roommate, even the squeaky laundry carts all make for a not-so-restful place to heal.

Hospitals need a prescription for quiet, and new research suggests it may not be easy to tamp down all the noise for a good night's sleep.

In fact, the wards with the sickest patients, the intensive care units, can be the loudest.

"It's just maddening," says Dr. Jeffrey Ellenbogen, sleep medicine chief at Massachusetts General Hospital.

One study found the decibel level in ICUs reaches that of a shout about half the time, he said.

Patient satisfaction surveys are full of complaints that the clamor makes sleep difficult. Yet remarkably little is known about exactly how that affects patients' bodies. So Ellenbogen and researchers from Harvard and the Cambridge Health Alliance recorded different kinds of hubbub in a community hospital in Boston's suburbs to try to find out.

Twelve healthy volunteers spent three nights in Massachusetts General's sleep lab, slumbering as recorded hospital sounds blared from nearby speakers at increasing volumes. Electronic sounds were the most likely to rouse people from sleep, even at decibel levels not much above a whisper, the researchers reported yesterday in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine.

What electronic sounds? Particularly troublesome was the beep-beep-beep from IV machines that signals someone needs more fluid or medicine. They're just one of a variety of alarms.

The alarms are to alert hospital workers, of course. Some hospitals are testing ways to make at least some monitors flash signals at the nurses' stations rather than sound loudly at the bedside. -- AP