Mandy Kachur, Soundscape Engineering LLC partner and Principal consultant, recently returned from Washing D.C., where she was participating in the working group, led by the Center for Health Design, that has been tasked with the development, dissemination, and validation of a 'Patient and Worker Safety Risk Assessment' online toolkit that can be used by health care facility planners, owners, and design teams to improve facilities through Evidence Based Design. Noise control is...
...part of risk minimization for medication errors, psychiatric injury and falls. The group is working, on behalf of the Facilities Guidelines Institute and the Agency for Healthcare Research & Quality, to methodically evaluate risk assessment in the healthcare facilities planning stage, in support of the AHRQ National Strategy for Quality Improvement in Health Care. The toolkit will also inform the risk assessment requirement of the 2014 Guidelines for Design and Construction of Hospitals and Outpatient Facilities. Ms. Kachur is the Acoustics Research Council's delegate to the working group. The Acoustics Research Council is the group of professionals responsible for writing the Noise and Vibration Control Guidelines for Healthcare Facility Design and Construction. She will present the development outcomes of the online tool to the acoustics community at the Acoustical Society of America conference this December in San Francisco.