New approach to evaluate Acoustic Pollution in hospital environments

There are many different services within a hospital. This means different types of noise which can be considered as acoustic pollution. Knowing that preterm infants exposed to high amounts of noise in the NICU are at a much higher risk because of their neurologic immaturity and physiologic instability, that excessive levels of noise also affect the persons and it can also impede some studies on patients, it was proposed to evaluate the Sound Pressure Level in some services of the Instituto de Maternidad, Tucuman, Argentina. During SABI 2011, this workgroup presented their first results in this matter. In this paper, there were evaluated the new Level III NICU -with new facilities in a different physical space in the hospital-, the laundry service and the attenuation factor (AF) of the cabinet cover in a neonatal incubator. The measurements were performed with two type II sonometer -CENTER 322, Cirrus CR832C) and it was also used an incubator analyzer (FLUKE INCU) for the incubator. The average values obtained were of 64.3 dBA for the NICU, and 80.8 dBA for the laundry room; the AF was between 2.88–3.09 and 3.43 –both under different conditions.