Noise Pollution Control in Neonatal Service Units: A Multidisciplinary Approach

摘要

The continuous advances in medicine, and its technology associated, have increased the rate of preterm newborns (NB) that survive, but they have also invaded the patient's environment with numerous stimuli that have negative impact in NB's health. Noise is an omnipresent polluting agent in the hospital environment. Since 2007, the Departamento de Bioingenieria of the Universidad Nacional de Tucuman work jointly with the Instituto de Maternidad y Ginecologia "Nuestra Senora de las Mercedes" (TMNSM) -public health institution with Family Centered Maternity care policy-. In 2012 was created a team of IMNSM's professionals trained on the Newborn Individualized Developmental Care and Assessment Program. The objective of this paper is to present the instruments designed by the Biomedical Engineering team to implement and support the Individualized Newborn Developmental Care and Assessment Program at the Neonatology Service following a sustainable project policy. For this purpose, it was performed a survey to the service stable staff, an Environmental Noise measurement procedure was developed and implemented -in this stage specific for neonatology service-, and a Medical Technology inventory was performed to correlate them with specific noise sources. The service stable staff participated voluntarily and stated that the perceived noise level is high and there are changes over the daily schedule, this fact was verified by the measured average values -between 62.5 and 64.6 dBA-. The noise sources identified were those due to people and their activities, facilities and technology, being some of them eliminable or reducible; these facts lead to the upcoming project strategies.