Quieter care spaces that can be disinfected every day. Acoustic panels do that by absorbing sound energy that would otherwise bounce between hard surfaces. In patient rooms the main sound sources are equipment, alarms, staff and visitors, and the most common complaints are that alarms and corridor noise disturb sleep, conversations are not private, and that hard, cleanable surfaces make every space ring.
What is going wrong in the room
Every hard surface reflects sound. When a room has a lot of them, each sound keeps bouncing for a long time and overlaps the next one. That build-up is called reverberation, and it is measured as RT60: the time it takes a sound to fade by 60 decibels. A typical patient room of 16 × 13 ft with a 9 ft ceiling has a volume of about 1,872 ft³. With hard and bare surfaces (tile, concrete, glass and little soft furniture), its echo time is about 1.96 seconds. The target for patient rooms is 0.50 seconds.
What panels can and cannot do
- Panels can shorten reverberation, remove flutter echo, make speech clearer and lower the overall noise level that builds up in the room.
- Panels cannot stop sound passing through walls, floors or doors. That is soundproofing, which needs mass, airtightness and isolation. See soundproofing and STC for patient rooms.
The recommended starting point
For a patient room like the one above, we suggest about 23 24 × 48 in rectangular panel, 1 in thicks, which brings the echo time down to about 0.50 s. That is roughly 35% of the wall area if the panels went on the walls. A good split for patient rooms is about 50% on walls and 50% on the ceiling.
Open the designer with this setup loaded, or browse ready-made models on our hospital and patient rooms solutions page.
Plan it in five steps
- Measure the room and note what the floor, walls and ceiling are made of.
- Work out how many panels you need with the room calculator or the worked example for patient rooms.
- Decide where they go, starting with the placement guide.
- Choose thickness, fabric and color to suit the room and its cleaning needs.
- Check the fire and code requirements before you order.
Guides for patient rooms
- How many acoustic panels does a patient rooms need?
- Where to put acoustic panels in a patient rooms
- Wall acoustics for patient rooms
- Ceiling acoustics for patient rooms
- Choosing panel thickness for a patient rooms
- What acoustic treatment costs for a patient rooms
- Installing acoustic panels in a patient rooms
- Common acoustic mistakes in patient rooms