What Quiet Mode does
- Corridor and display tones go quiet for routine and assistance calls during quiet hours (default 22:00–06:00), or when a nurse starts it for a rest period.
- Everything else stays on: over-door and reassurance lights, corridor displays, the Ward Gateway, and the call to the right phone over Olinqua or Ascom.
- Emergency and code calls stay audible. Always.
- It fails safe. If the messaging heartbeat is lost, a call goes unacknowledged past the escalation time, quiet hours end or the maximum duration passes, the audio comes back by itself. If the silent path cannot be proven, the ward is not silent.
- It's on the record. Every start and stop, every silently delivered call and every fail-safe restore is logged and appears in the Ward Gateway reports.
Why it matters
- Sleep is treatment. Fragmented sleep slows healing and raises delirium risk; quiet-time programmes in critical care reported fewer sleep interruptions, lower nurse stress and a 27% rise in patients rating the ward "always quiet".
- Alarm fatigue is a safety hazard. Staff exposed to hundreds of alarms a shift respond later to all of them. Fewer corridor tones, delivered to the right person, is the recognised fix — not louder tones.
- It's what hospitals are asking for. The NHS "Silent Hospital" pilot at Royal Cornwall replaced audible call bells with silent alerts to staff phones and reported better sleep, better postnatal recovery and real savings. Australian health districts are publishing the same approach with clinical smartphones.
Honest about the evidence
Bundled "quiet hospital" programmes show mixed results in meta-analyses, and Monash Health's own 2019 rapid review found no study isolating paging tones as a single intervention. The consistent wins come from silent, supervised delivery to staff devices plus protected rest periods — which is exactly what Quiet Mode implements and measures.
Where it runs
Quiet Mode is a feature of the Edge Node EN-01, reporting through the Ward Gateway. It works on a new Southerly installation and on a legacy system the Edge Node is driving — many hospitals get quiet nights months before they replace a single call point.
Standards
Southerly Nurse Call is designed to AS 3811:2026. Quiet Mode silences a tone only while delivery to staff devices is supervised; emergency calls are never silenced; audio restores automatically if supervision is lost. It does not silence medical-device alarms (pumps, monitors), which are governed separately.
Try it on one ward
We offer a 60-day Quiet Mode pilot on a single low-acuity ward — maternity, rehab or an aged-care wing — with before-and-after night-time noise logging and a one-page report for the DON. Delivered through your accredited partner.