The Evaluation of Noise Annoyance in a Tertiary Care Hospital

Aims: 
The aim of this study was the analysis of the relation between noise annoyance and the other sound indicators including speech interference level (SIL), preferred noise criterion (PNC), and sound pressure level (SPL) utilizing demographic variants (age, sex, marital status, and education) at the hospital.
Methods: 
In this research, SPL was studied in the intensive care unit (ICU) and emergency department of Isfahan’s Al-Zahra Hospital. Sound Level Meter (SLM) was undertaken according to ISO 9612 within the designated stations, followed by determining the SIL and PNC indicators. The questionnaire about noise annoyance and demographic variants was simultaneously filled out by 60 individuals. Eventually, the relationships between objective indicators with noise annoyance and also objective indicators with age variable were obtained by Pearson’s correlation test, using SPSS version 16 and Excel software.
Results: 
The results showed that the average indicators of SPL, PNC, and SIL with the values of 61.82, 51.03, and 70.79, respectively, were more than the respective standards. In addition, the results of analyzing noise annoyance showed that the mean and standard deviation of this parameter equals to 60.54 ± 1.43, which demonstrates the extreme rate of this scale. The Pearson’s correlation test did not show any meaningful relation among noise annoyance and the indicators SPL, SIL, and PNC. However, a meaningful relation was found between the SIL and PNC indicators (P < 0.005).
Conclusions: 
Considering the findings, an average of all acoustic indicators studied in the ICU and emergency departments of the hospital are more than the national standards. Furthermore, the scale of noise annoyance in the severe rating indicates that people in the hospital environment are affected by noise and are harassed. Based on this, it seems necessary to plan and adopt managerial and technical-engineering measures to reduce the level of noise pollution to the permitted limits of the standard.