Acoustical Conformance with FGI for Tenant Improvements in Outpatient, Medical Office or Clinic Facility Sound Isolation/Privacy Design

Abstract

Acoustical privacy and noise control design and implementation guidance is needed, regarding Facility Guidelines Institute (FGI) criteria for outpatient medical facilty tenant improvements (TI). TI in existing commercial buildings or medical office buildings may not have capital budgets or expected facility/lease life that hospitals enjoy. Full conformance to FGI criteria and guidelines may be limited; by economic feasibility and by constructability. Design professionals can use "good practice" space planning, demising assembly selection, and electronic sound masking to achieve appropriate acoustical privacy within reasonable capital expense budgets. Consider FGI criteria for demising partition, ceiling, door and window selections plus infrastructure equipment and material selections that can provide cost-effective lightweight, common construction standards. The objectives are to protect the privacy of patient information and provide quiet spaces, free of transient disturbance for clear speech communications. Continuous ambient sound increases speech privacy including speech transmitted from enclosed quiet spaces. Criteria for acoustics, speech privacy,continuous noise and masking exists in FGI. Temporal level changes (on/off, transients) and tonality (spectrum smoothness or balance) should be considered in basis-of-design (BoD). This paper will present design guidelines for selecting demising assemblies and supplemental sound masking for outpatient clinical spaces in commercial or medical office buildings.