OU authors featured in an editorial in the Journal of Critical Care

Sometimes journals highlight a few articles in each issue with an editorial. If your paper is selected for an editorial, this means the editor of the journal thinks it is particularly important or noteworthy. The October 2012 issue of the Journal of Critical Care contains an editorial by Maurene A. Harvey describing the article Noise in Hospital Intensive Care Units—A Critical Review of a Critical Topic (Volume 27, Pages 522.e1-522.e9, 2012), by Avinash Konkani and Barbara Oakley. Harvey writes

“In this issue of the Journal of Critical Care, Avinash Konkani [1] from Oakland University's Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering offers a review of the literature on noise in intensive care units (ICUs). The primary focus of the review is 10 studies that measured noise levels in ICUs before and after an intervention. The conclusion reached is that none of the interventions were able to achieve the noise levels currently recommended by the World Health Organization, the International Noise Council, or the Environmental Protection Agency.

This is no surprise to critical care practitioners or ICU patients and families. In my 45-year career as a critical care nurse, ICU noise is one of the few things that, rather than improving, is getting worse. Patient acuity is increasing. The number of sound-producing devices used is increasing. The number of parameters and devices being monitored with alarms is increasing. As a result, the average noise level in ICU is rising.”

Konkani, Oakley, and Thomas Bauld have an article on a related topic, Reducing Hospital Noise: A Review of Medical Device Alarm Management, published recently in the journal Biomedical Instrumentation and Technology (Volume 46, Pages 478-487, 2012).

Konkani is a graduate student in the Systems Engineering PhD program. Oakley is an Associate Professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering. She is a Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineers and was a vice president of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society.