Industries
Long-term care acoustics
A long-term care home is not a small hospital. It is where people live, often for years, and often with hearing loss and cognitive change that make the acoustic environment matter more than it would anywhere else. The design goal is a home, not a ward, and that pulls against most of the obvious ways to make a building quiet.
The evidence is unusually direct. Noise in these settings is associated with confusion, agitation and withdrawal from social contact, and the sources are mundane: alarms, intercoms, televisions, corridors, mealtimes. Getting the acoustics right is part of the care model, not a finish.
Our experience
The engineers at Bentham have worked on long-term care as part of larger healthcare projects, including LTC components of hospital campus redevelopments in Ontario, alongside a broad base of healthcare and residential work.
That combination is most of what this building type needs. Long-term care sits between a hospital and an apartment building: resident rooms are closer to dwelling units than to patient rooms, while the alarms, nurse call systems, service areas and clinical spaces behave like a hospital. The problems come from the seam between the two, and they are the same problems we deal with on either side of it.
Bentham Acoustics is new. Its engineers are not. The projects described here were carried out by Bentham engineers over their careers, at this firm and before it.
A full list of relevant project experience is available on request.
What comes up most
It has to feel like a home.
The finishes and layouts that make an institution quiet are the ones that make it feel institutional. Hard surfaces for cleaning, long corridors, wide sightlines for supervision. Resolving that tension is most of the design problem, and it is best resolved early, when where the absorption goes and what it looks like are still open questions rather than a late substitution from whatever fits the budget.
Nurse call and alarms.
Systems have to be audible to staff without being disruptive to residents, and evenly distributed across the areas they cover. Coverage, level and distribution are set during design and are difficult to change afterward. This is the system most likely to generate resident complaints and the least likely to be looked at by an acoustician unless someone asks.
The household model.
Smaller households are now the preferred form, partly because they are quieter and reduce agitation. They also multiply the number of dining rooms, lounges and kitchenettes, each of which is an acoustic space in its own right.
Dining and common areas.
Mealtimes are the loudest part of the day and the hardest for residents with hearing loss to follow. These rooms carry more of the acoustic burden than their floor area suggests.
Resident to resident.
Televisions, conversation and night-time noise between rooms is a persistent operational complaint, and it is governed by decisions made in the partition and door details. A detail that underperforms becomes a nightly complaint and a room that cannot be allocated to certain residents, so the question at design is not only whether it meets the criterion but whether it will still be working in year fifteen.
Service, delivery and the site.
Receiving areas, waste handling, kitchens and parking all have to sit away from resident and public areas, and on a tight or shared site those requirements compete with each other. That is a site plan conversation, not a later one.
Hearing loss and cognition.
Residents are more affected by noise than the general population and less able to move away from it. A background level that would be unremarkable elsewhere is not neutral here.
Standards and requirements in Ontario
Long-term care sits between two frameworks. As a residential occupancy, the Ontario Building Code’s acoustic provisions apply in a way they do not in a hospital, since resident rooms are closer to dwelling units than to patient rooms. As a care setting, the design is also shaped by healthcare guidance, CSA Z8000 and the FGI Guidelines among them.
In Ontario the Long-Term Care Home Design Manual is the practical driver. It sets out requirements that are acoustic in effect even where they are not framed that way: nurse call systems audible to staff without being excessive or disruptive to residents and evenly distributed across the areas they serve, and receiving and service space located away from resident and public areas so residents are not exposed to noise.
Beyond the codes, the evidence base is unusually specific for a building type. Research on dementia care associates elevated noise with confusion, agitation and reduced social interaction, and the design guidance that follows from it, including the move to smaller households, is now standard rather than exceptional.