Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

After just giving birth, new moms should be in an environment where resting and healing can take place. However, new mothers often experience disruptions and noise from visitors, hospital staff and intercom announcements amongst other things. These may affect important learning activities, such as breastfeeding and may also negatively impact their mental health. A possible solution is a quiet time, a designated period of rest time each day for new moms. This has been used in some hospitals and sometimes on maternity wards but there has been very little formal research to evaluate what patients and staff think about this idea and whether or not it is effective. In the first phase of the study we measured noise levels, number of interruptions and patient perspectives before introducing a quiet time on a maternity unit in a Montreal hospital. We measured noise levels using an iPhone app (called Decibel 10th) and we observed the unit at different times in the afternoon to count the number of interruptions. We also asked new moms to complete a survey about their hospital experience and invited 10 of them to participate in an interview to ask them about their hospital stay and the idea of a quiet time. Additionally, the project included observation of a large group of staff from all the departments involved in services to the maternity ward (e.g. labs, nutrition, housekeeping, nurses, physicians and a patient representative) to observe how they planned for the change. Results show that average noise levels were higher than recommended by The World Health Organization. Furthermore, new moms were interrupted, on average, between 2-4 times every half hour, in the afternoon. Visits by family members and nurses created the most interruptions. Both the staff and moms felt that a quiet time would be beneficial and appreciated the idea.