Design
WHO Noise Guidelines
WHO Guidelines for Community Noise (hospital wards)
World Health OrganizationLatest · 1999 (guidelines for community noise)
Edition last checked against publisher sources:
Scope
WHO's community-noise guidelines recommend sound-level thresholds for hospital patient rooms, widely cited in acoustic-design work. Actual hospital noise routinely exceeds these levels; the guidelines set the target, not the norm.
Where it applies in the room
- Patient room acoustic design
- Alarm sound-level calibration
Key requirements at a glance
| Ward rooms, night | 30 dB LAeq indoors (8-hour), with individual sound events not exceeding 40 dB LAmax (fast). |
|---|---|
| Ward rooms, day and evening | 30 dB LAeq indoors (16-hour). |
| Treatment and observation rooms | WHO advises the equivalent level should not exceed 35 dB LAeq in most rooms where patients are treated or observed. |
Summarized for reference. Consult the source document for the definitive text.
Caveats
- Values are from the 1999 Guidelines for Community Noise, section 4.3.3 and Table 4.1. WHO's 2018 Environmental Noise Guidelines for the European Region address environmental noise sources and do not replace these indoor hospital values.
Source & further reading
- · WHO Guidelines for Community Noise (1999) — publisher
Also known as
- WHO Guidelines for Community Noise
- WHO noise guidelines
- WHO noise
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