Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, 771 Ferst Drive, Atlanta, Georgia 30332-0405, USA.
J Acoust Soc Am. 2013 Jul;134(1):586-95. doi: 10.1121/1.4807034.
Effective communication between staff members is key to patient safety in hospitals. A variety of patient care activities including admittance, evaluation, and treatment rely on oral communication. Surprisingly, published information on speech intelligibility in hospitals is extremely limited. In this study, speech intelligibility measurements and occupant evaluations were conducted in 20 units of five different U.S. hospitals. A variety of unit types and locations were studied. Results show that overall, no unit had "good" intelligibility based on the speech intelligibility index (SII > 0.75) and several locations found to have "poor" intelligibility (SII < 0.45). Further, occupied spaces were found to have 10%-15% lower SII than unoccupied spaces on average. Additionally, staff perception of communication problems at nurse stations was significantly correlated with SII ratings. In a targeted second phase, a unit treated with sound absorption had higher SII ratings for a larger percentage of time as compared to an identical untreated unit. Taken as a whole, the study provides an extensive baseline evaluation of speech intelligibility across a variety of hospitals and unit types, offers some evidence of the positive impact of absorption on intelligibility, and identifies areas for future research.
医护人员之间的有效沟通是医院患者安全的关键。各种患者护理活动，包括入院、评估和治疗，都依赖于口头沟通。令人惊讶的是，医院语音清晰度的已发表信息极其有限。在这项研究中，对美国五家不同医院的 20 个病房进行了语音清晰度测量和入住者评估。研究了各种类型和位置的病房。结果表明，总体而言，没有一个病房的语音清晰度指数（SII>0.75）达到“良好”，有几个位置的语音清晰度被发现为“差”（SII<0.45）。此外，占用空间的语音清晰度指数平均比未占用空间低 10%-15%。此外，护士站工作人员对沟通问题的感知与 SII 评分显著相关。在有针对性的第二阶段，与相同的未处理病房相比，经过吸音处理的病房在更大比例的时间内具有更高的 SII 评分。总的来说，该研究提供了对各种医院和病房类型的语音清晰度的广泛基准评估，提供了一些吸收对清晰度的积极影响的证据，并确定了未来研究的领域。
