“Persuading hospitals and manufacturers to adopt better alarms aside from the standard is to persuade them that this is important and that it’s cool to do so, and that this is what everybody is doing and it’s a selling point for you if you’re using better alarms or more safe alarms or your false alarm rates are lower. Because that's a key problem with the whole alarm problem, it’s this very high false alarm rate, so there are a number of ways in which you can persuade people to change their practice. But they're not necessarily what you think.”-- Professor Judy Edworthy

Recently I had the chance to moderate a panel in The Power of Sound club on Clubhouse about sound in healthcare called "Alarms are Killing Us," and it was quite the discussion. My panelists came from all sectors of the health industry and included Dr. Joseph Schlesinger, Dr. Elif Özcan, Professor Judy Edworthy, and Professor Michael Schutz, who’s been featured as a guest on this podcast.

We talked about how sound has a profound effect on us, for better and for worse. Hospitals have been described as "beeping hellscapes,” which isn't surprising, considering how many machines there are in the typical hospital and all the noises that they make. But do they really have to make that much noise? And do they have to make the same noises that they've been making since the 1950s (when there were a lot less of them)? When does an alarm become too alarming? What effect does all that sound pollution have in an environment that's supposed to heal us? How can we fix it? Do notifications need to sound like alarms? Join my expert panelists and me as we discuss how the medical soundscape got so bad, and what we can do to change things. This is an important topic for all of us and I hope you'll get a lot from it. Let's hope that new standards are adopted widely – and soon!

As always, if you have any questions for my guest, you’re welcome to reach out through the links in the show notes.  If you have questions for me, just visit www.audiobrandingpodcast.com where you’ll find all sorts of ways to get in touch. Plus, subscribing to the newsletter (on the www.audiobrandingpodcast.com webpage) will let you know when the new podcasts are available.

Too Many Alarms

We start the discussion with an introduction from each of our panelists and their thoughts about solving the medical alarm problem. “People have difficulty talking about sound,” Judy says as she tells us about her team’s early challenges in overcoming preconceptions about hospital sounds. “They have difficulty describing what the sound should be like. We didn’t have a set of metrics against which to evaluate any new set of alarms.” Dr. Özcan agrees and tells us about her hands-on research into just how many sounds, most of them false alarms, exist in a hospital setting. “We measured up to 12,000 alarms in one unit,” Elif says, “and that’s too many alarms for anyone to handle.”

Sculpting a Better Sound

Dr. Schlesinger introduces himself next, and he relates his own firsthand experience as a doctor and how the number of false alarms can not only affect the staff but how the patients perceive the staff's response to them. "What's the perception of the quality of care,” he asks, “if we seem lackadaisical to these alarms?” Michael tells us about how he met the rest of the group, and he describes his work in researching and creating a better soundscape in hospitals. As he puts it, “what I’m doing a lot of is looking at sort of the nuance to see how we can sculpt the sound to make it better.”

A Culture Shift

The first question for our group concerns the resistance...