A method proposal to ensure speech privacy in multi-bed treatment rooms

Patient confidentiality is one of many important aspects in good treatment unit design and is an important issue among patients and healthcare providers. Conditions such as insufficient space, infrastructure, separation of beds with curtains, continuous increase in the number of patients coming to the emergency room, organization and time pressure are the main reasons why patients' privacy cannot be guaranteed. Considering the vulnerability of patients in units such as emergency services and intensive care units, where a large number of patients are present at the same time, protecting the privacy of patients is always considered as the duty of the healthcare team. The effect of the architectural environment is very important in ensuring patient privacy. While the patient is satisfied with the designs made in line with the user requirements, there is a need for solutions that can protect healthcare professionals against various sanctions, can be controlled and offered by different disciplines. In this study, a method is proposed to test alternative options that anticipate the optimum usage conditions of the area in all operational and organizational processes in multiple treatment units, without violating the confidentiality conditions. In order to test the method, the scenarios determined in the emergency department multi-bed treatment units were simulated with ODEON 15.16 and the objective parameters related to the privacy of the speech obtained were compared with the TS EN 3382-3 standard parameters. In this context, the applicability of the proposed method was evaluated and suggestions were made to ensure the confidentiality of speech in multi-bed treatment units.