We all know that hospitals can be a very chaotic place, what with the nurses running around constantly, numerous patients passing time and the occasional victim with severe injuries being rushed into the emergency room. In the past it was mostly due to technological limitations and scarcity of funds that hospital conditions couldn’t be significantly improved upon. However, the Australian government rightly feels that it is time to take a bold leap into the future and push the limits of what is possible using the most advanced modern technology and architectural ingenuity.
A hospital for the modern age
The new Royal Adelaide Hospital, which is scheduled to open in mid-2016, is going to be a monumental undertaking on the part of the South Australian government which plans to invest heavily in this project – approximately 1.85 billion dollars over the course of the next decade. The new hospital will focus on providing the very best care possible to its patients and will feature 800 beds, the latest equipment and extremely fast emergency services. In order to provide the speediest transport of injured victims to the hospital there will be a helipad on the roof. And this is where things got a bit complicated for a moment – since the official motto is “Providing the best possible medical care to patients, whilst affording them privacy, peace and dignity”, placing an incredibly loud helicopter on the roof seems to directly oppose their intended goals.
The nature of the problem
This is where the latest in soundproofing technology comes into play. Scientist form the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) will provide their unique expertise in hopes of making the most advanced hospital in Australia a quiet place where patients can recover in peace. Standard sound-proofing, the kind that some people have in their homes, just won’t cut it when you have 105 decibels of noise and strong vibrations right on top of the patients and staff. To give you a picture of just how loud that is imagine a person screaming at the top of their lungs. That’s 85 decibels, and an increase of 10 decibels equals to about a 100% increase in noise, which means that the hospital will need soundproofing that can effectively withstand 200% more noise than people screaming in the hallways would make.
So how have they solved the noise problem?
The vigilant people at the CSIRO Sound lab have had to basically reinvent the wheel on this one. Since the normal practice of soundproofing windows – having two glass surfaces placed close to each other and having the spaced between them sealed off – simply isn’t enough, the easiest solution was to go with the basic idea, only putting an additional layer on. The windows will have three separate glass panels – which will be considerably thicker than on soundproof windows installed in home and apartment buildings – that are going to be spaced further apart. This should, in theory, be enough of a barrier to prevent even the extremely loud helicopter noise from crossing over into the rooms where patients might be sleeping. However, being the hard-working scientists that they are, the guys and gals at CSIRO did some extensive testing, and I do mean extensive, to make sure that this solution would work.
They worked closely with Yuanda, a world-renowned façade manufacturer, to come up with an adequate soundproofing solution. They then built a solid brick wall between two sound chambers, installed the soundproof glass they had been working on into the wall and then blasted some loud noise – measured to a little over 100db to match the noise a helicopter would produce – in one chamber while precisely measuring sound and pressure levels in the other chamber. And then they tore down the wall and built another one so they could fit a window with different dimensions. And then they repeated this process 11 times, tearing down and rebuilding like busy little ants, until they had solid data on the various façade elements that would be built into the new Royal Adelaide Hospital. The experiment was a success and it seems that the hospital will in fact be a very quiet, peaceful place where can rest and recuperate.
The South Australian government truly went out of its way to ensure that its citizens get the finest medical assistance, with quick emergency response times and a calm environment where patients are treated with dignity and respect. We can only hope that other developed countries will follow in Australia’s footsteps.