Hospital project on noise, sound and sleep (HPNoSS)

Research Project

Led by Professor Anne Marie Rafferty (King's College London), Dr Andreas Xyrichis (King's College London), Dr John Wynne, Professor Angus Carlyle and Dr Jamie Mackrill (Imperial College London)

April 2017 – September 2017

HPNoSS is a collaboration between King's College London's Florence Nightingale Faculty of Nursing & Midwifery, University of the Arts London’s London College of Communication, and Imperial College London’s Dyson School of Design Engineering, supported by the Cultural Institute at King’s.

Hospital project on noise, sound and sleep (HPNoSS) is a collaborative project that aims to provide a holistic understanding of sound in the hospital environment and the intimate relationship of noise to sleep, rest, treatment and recovery.

Patients sleep poorly in hospital, which negatively impacts on their recovery and experience. Sound is a significant contributor to poor sleep quality and quantity. Despite continued research on sound levels over the past 20 years addressing the problem of ‘noise’, recommended maximum sound levels for hospitals set by a number of national and international bodies are regularly exceeded. This also impacts on the sleep of patients and the practice of staff. Therefore, a fresh approach is required; an approach that allows sound and the soundscape to be viewed as a positive and malleable component of the healthcare environment.

Hospital project on noise, sound and sleep is a project that is running April 2017 – September 2017. It brings together a team of academics, artists, engineers, nurses and patient advocates. It aims to provide a holistic understanding of sound in the hospital environment and the intimate relationship of noise to sleep, rest, treatment and recovery. The project will help to raise awareness of the issues around noise amongst nursing, medical and other hospital staff and explore creative and practical solutions that will contribute to patient wellbeing and potentially improve recovery times.

Through extending existing work around creative research in sound arts practice to healthcare, the project aims to improve the patient and staff experience of staying, and working, in hospitals with implications for the wellbeing of both groups. In the short term, the work would lead to the development of innovative and practical solutions to improving the experience of sound in hospitals. In the long-term, there is potential for making concrete policy recommendations at national and international level, leading towards widespread implementation and development of a range of related solutions that could have a positive impact on the experience of noise and sound both within and outside of hospitals.

The pilot experiment consists of a symposium, titled Workshop on positive hospital soundscapes, which will aim to capture preference and composition of positive features of a hospital soundscape through a participatory approach.

The project is being supported by two tech companies, one specialising in sound masking and the other in noise-cancelling, who will lend equipment to test during the symposium, such as speakers and headphones. This will enable the team to explore participants’ perceptions of different sound manipulation techniques, such as masking with sound, white/pink noise, noise cancelling or a combination of these.

The team are in discussions with and have support for the project from clinical teams at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, West Middlesex Hospital and St George’s Hospital. They are in the process of organising access to different clinical environments in these hospitals, through which to obtain sample soundscapes. In addition, they plan to combine the sound logging exercise with field observations by visiting the hospitals to make qualitative field notes that can give context to and help with the analysis.

As of May 2017, the team have collected sample recordings from Intensive Care Units having used logging equipment to capture sound continuously over 24 – 72 hour periods in order to identify variation and fluctuation.

In November 2018 journal article Noise pollution in hospitals, Excessive noise is damaging for both patients and staff, by Andreas Xyrichis, John Wynne, Jamie Mackrill, Anne Marie Rafferty and Angus Carlyle was published in The BMJ journal.

Professor Anne Marie Rafferty is Professor of Nursing Policy at the Florence Nightingale Faculty of Nursing and Midwifery, at King's. Her interests include workforce research and policy; quality of work environments; nurse and patient outcomes; nursing history, international and colonial nursing; research and health policy.

Dr Andreas Xyrichis is a Lecturer at the Florence Nightingale Faculty of Nursing & Midwifery at King’s. Andreas has a clinical background in intensive care nursing and has previously undertaken ethnographic (observational) work in hospitals’ intensive care units, which explored among other things the influence of the sensory environment on health professionals’ practice; for example, the distracting effect of alarms on collaborative behaviour.

Dr John Wynne is Reader in Sound Arts at the University of the Arts London. His work has been exhibited internationally in galleries and museums, and he won the 2010 British Composer Award for Sonic Art. He has been artist-in-residence at two leading organ transplant centres: the exhibition Transplant and Life, in collaboration with photographer Tim Wainwright, brings the patient voice into the medical museum, a site more commonly associated with specimens, hardware and clinical heroes. He is seeking to apply and extend his research into the perception of sound in hospitals while exploring the possibilities for creative interventions with the potential to improve patient experience. See his website for more information about his work and follow him on Twitter here. Find out more about John’s work: https://www.sensitivebrigade.com and https://www.transplantproject.com

Professor Angus Carlyle is Professor of Sound and Landscape at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. Angus’ work explores the creative potential of sound as the basis of a documentary practice, building on approaches he developed through previous work.

Dr Jamie Mackrill is a Lecturer in Design Engineering at the Dyson School of Design Engineering, Imperial College London. Jamie has a background in exploring hospital soundscapes and appropriate interventions aiming to provide a more positive experience of the hospital soundscape; and is interested in developing appropriate and suitable methods to capture human response to different contexts.

For regular updates on the HPNoSS project, follow the team on Twitter: @AndreasXyrichis @annemarieraffer @JamieMackrill1

Hospital project on noise, sound and sleep (HPNoSS)