Objective: to ascertain how patients perceive noise and its influence on their hospital stay. This work is part of a research line on the environmental conditions of hospitals.
Material and methods: cross-sectional descriptive study through a questionnaire with item referring to the noise source, time schedule and characteristics of noise. The population included 193 patients pertaining to 4 different category hospitals and provinces. The selected services, attending to their different work volume, were: Intensive Care Unit, Department of Surgery and Department of Paediatrics.
Results: the noise source that most bothered the patients was the actual people when they talked loud with a 64,8%, the time area where the highest level of sound was noted was between 9 and 21 hours, with 77% of the noise, nonetheless, it was more bothersome during the night, with a 31% or even in the late afternoon, being aggravated when the patients were in pain (28,5%). The characteristics of the worst noise were high volume and those that repeated the same sounds over and over again (35,2%).
Conclusions: the greatest perception of noise originates in easily accessible sources. These sources are however, not that expensive to fix by implementing corrective measures such as telling people to speak more softly and to turn down alarms. The proposal presented by the research team is education in habits, norms and behaviours aimed at facilitating a more harmonious acoustic surrounding and the study of architectonic proposals to replace noisy signals by light signals, to the extent such change might be possible.