My wife has been in the hospital regularly over the past 18 months probably 20 days total. This is a renowned research hospital with a gorgeous, vibrant facility and spacious rooms.
They absolutely 100% ignore any semblance of a sleep cycle for their patients (as well as proper nutrition but that's for another day). Constant interruptions to check vitals, ask if we want to pick a meal, beeping infusion pumps, a whole squad going on rounds with banal questions...it seems to never end.
I'd like to find a watch/fitbit for her and either find or write an app that just fills the screen with a color based on her current sleep phase...green she's awake, yellow light sleep and red means she's in REM or deep sleep and should not be disturbed unless necessary. Place that by the door so the nurses can see and hopefully adjust their timing accordingly.
Have you had a conversation to address concerns about your spouse’s care? There is always some flexibility around the care that she’d be receiving, and one core component to that is your rational/measured input, either in person or by phone. Framing your concern as rational helps immensely in establishing a dialogue with care staff. It sounds like your core problem is that you want to be bothered less.
Nurses are not there to make every patient's stay miserable. At least in my practice setting, we are extraordinarily receptive to suggestions around care and stepping in as informal advocates when families are not available.
> I'd like to find a watch/fitbit for her and either find or write an app that just fills the screen with a color based on her current sleep phase...
Related to this: I looked into trying to get real time sleep data found it surprisingly hard. Fitbit, for example, only makes sleep data available after sleeping is over and the device is synced to the cloud. If anyone has a good solution to this I'm all ears.
Yup. Been there, done that. I had to get rather obstreperous with the nurses to make them leave me alone as much as possible, so that I could get sleep.
I also had 32db NRR earplugs that I take with me everywhere (my hearing can be very sensitive), and I used those extensively.
I got lucky and I wasn’t in the hospital for long. Once I got home, I could sleep as much as I needed.
Unfortunately sleep phase detection is not real time, even assuming you could get staff to pay attention to it. If you can get the hospital to care about sleep though, maybe they could start coordinating enough to consolidate wakings.
Waking anyone uncaringly, insensitively, etc (too hard, too early) was the absolute worst sin in my mother's book, and mine too.
In a way, it shows how powerful someone is, that they could take something so valuable from another with almost no effort, and yet so lost if they would do so.
> a whole squad going on rounds with banal questions
I’m sure there’s a better way, but that’s par for the course for a research/teaching hospital. The patient’s room is a real-life classroom and lab, with everything that goes along with that.
If you need help developing the app, let me know! I do iOS and Android development so maybe I can help a bit. I haven’t worked in the sleep cycle field but we can figure out things maybe.
Any time my wife tried to sleep in her last hospital stay, the attached vital checkers got jostled and started beeping. She is used to sleeping in a reclined position and sleeps easily. I have no idea how a less-easy sleeper would get by.
I’m a doctor and I agree lack of sleep is a huge problem for inpatient care. I (and most of my colleagues) try to avoid waking patients wherever possible. The main reasons I need to wake patients at night is:
a) they are unwell. This is unavoidable
b) recanullating for fluids/medication that need to be administered overnight.
c) for new admissions I need to do more routine tasks (ensure regular meds are prescribed in time for morning, or chase scan results/reassess patient/repeat bloods). This is necessary as for these patients (and patients who have become more unwell in hospital) there are too many unknowns to be able to safely leave it until morning, or need to be ready for theatre the next day.
The main problem I have is that I often wake up everyone else in the same bay due to lack of private rooms and the need to turn on lights and often shout at dead patients so they can hear me.
Beeping machines is a big problem, and the sooner they are made to wirelessly notify the better.
I must confess that the main reason I'm replying is to correct the darkly amusing dead->deaf typo that I'm hoping you made.
However, I wonder if you could comment on whether you think a) that you and your colleagues' approach is reflective of the broader medical community, b) you think earplugs could be feasibly issued in shared wards (from a financial/hygiene/other perspective)?
During our recent stay, while the monitors did indeed beep, it was possible to put them on silent mode, which the nursing staff was happy to do because the rooms all had nice big LED screens outside the door with vitals alerts and the nursing station had a much larger multi-monitor display showing each patient's status. It turned our problem into their problem, but we never had an issue with noise. A large part of this is also because we had a private room, and the rooms all had vestibules for further sound isolution (and containing the scrub-in sink & laundry bin).
That said, besides the specific reason our daughter was in-patient to address, she was otherwise vigorous and healthy, and that absolutely was not the case for the majority of the other kids no the ward, most of whom had congenital heart defects and other developmental conditions, and I can completely understand why it becomes more important to interrupt less stable patients.
I don't know why hospitals don't invest in the very same technology I use every night as a downtown urban area dweller to stay asleep -- a sleep mask, and headphones with a continuous stream of pink noise. I can sleep through pretty much anything in that cocoon, and I'm a fairly light sleeper.
There are a lot of exemptions in healthcare, sleep is part of this exceptional world, I was told bluntly 'we are not operating a hotel here' last time I spent a sleepless night in a hospital.
Food is another area of concern. You can starve during a hospital visit or end up broke buying supplemental calories in the shop.
Then there is the sheer difficulty of navigating the typical hospital if you are somewhat disabled or in agonising pain.
It is as if that every hospital operates at some subliminal level as a field hospital in some 19th century war. It is thoughtcrime to think of how the place is run is less than heroic. There is also triage so that people with serious problems get dealt with before those with minor ailments. Therefore it is fine to keep a lot of people waiting. Or is it?
In places that have a customer service ethos you don't keep people waiting. Apart from anything else it is just plain inefficient. The sleep thing is what I would consider inefficient. It is a given that at a typical hospital none of the patients are sleeping too well, if it is not disruption then it can be flimsy blankets. Sure any ward is not going to be your own bed, but we are way off any customer first thinking when it comes to this.
I have had discussions about this with plenty of people and the idea of customer service in healthcare is poo-pooed. Is there anywhere in the world where it has been given a try? Scandinavia? Or even Cuba? It is not rocket surgery giving the patients a good night's sleep and enjoyable food. In our private lives we recommend to others that have a big day ahead of them that they get a good night's sleep. Why does this go out the window in the world of healthcare, whether it be staff or patients?
I know that sleep is critical to healing. And I know that a lot of what happens to you in a hospital is very unpleasant. And I know that some things might seem silly, banal or irrelevant. But please remember that this is all done from a desire to keep you and other patients alive and (relatively) well.
Hospitals are always understaffed. Doctors and nurses don't have the time to keep the sleeping schedule of all their patients into account. If you want that to change, I guess more investments in healthcare would be the way to go.
People die in hospitals every day. If you're woken up a bunch of times while recovering from something, count your blessings that you're well enough to be woken up in the first place.
It's basic cost-benefit analysis. I completely appreciate where you're coming from, but despite all your points many of the checks are still silly, banal and irrelevant - the benefit of waking someone up mid sleep cycle to ask them what they want to eat, or to get them to fill out a questionnaire, or to take a blood sample when they've only had one an hour or two before, is not worth the cost. You're giving a passionate response about how lucky we are to have that care anyway, but frankly you are vastly underestimating the devastating effects broken sleep has on the body. Most of the patients are on opiates anyway, so sleep is already at a premium (sedation =/= sleep).
Hospitals are understaffed, but that does not mean they have an excuse to endanger patient safety by ruining their best method of recovery; sleep. Many of my friends work in sleep science. Ask any of them what they think about the current ways we treat patient sleep, and they'll go on an hour long tirade about how absolutely ridiculous it is - how there are 100s of things that we could be doing differently, but don't because of antiquated science and work dogma, and there is almost no reason for close to 50% of times we wake patients up.
I highly recommend "Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker. He puts a massive spotlight on the health implications that are cause by lack of sleep, especially for the elderly who make up the most hospital patients.
I do agree with what you've said, but I don't agree with the conclusion, so I want to provide a counterpoint and I hope I don't come across as unconstructive in doing so.
Just because doctors and nurses have a desire to help, doesn't mean that anything they do is therefore the right thing to do. Like you said, we know that sleep is critical to healing so doesn't that go against nurses and doctors having a desire to prevent harm? I would think that something preventing healing or causing emotional stress is de-facto harm.
Yes, hospitals can be understaffed and underfunded, but that's hardly an excuse when we know some of their practises can cause harm. You wouldn't let a nurse do something harmful and let them say "Sorry we don't have the budget". We can sit here and say that yes, here's the reason but that doesn't actually mean that's what they ought to be doing.
There seems to be quite a lot of bias for doctors and nurses because they do work that is seen as very important and good. While that is true, it can often cloud judgement when deciding what we ought to do in a prescriptive medical sense. There's been many occassions where doctors or nurses were holding back advancement of their own field because they're just people and like all people they have their own faults and their own bias. I don't say this to say that doctors are bad, or cause harm, but rather that some are bad and some do cause harm, even if they're trying their best to stop you dying.
Sure, but there still is a huge difference in the way staff deals with it.
When my daughter of three weeks old was in the hospital she needed to get some checks at night. Some doctors would walk in with a little flashlight, do the checks and leave the room without waking her up.
Others would switch on the ultra bright hospital lighting waking up the little one, only to do checks which take 10 seconds but kept my daughter up for hours.
'Doctors and nurses don't have the time to keep the sleeping schedule of all their patients into account.'
Speaking from the UK, where this problem has been well publicised, the biggest complaint being disturbance during the night when it ought to be obvious that most people will be asleep?
Accepted there will be exceptions where patients are sleeping during the day and this does present obvious problems. However, where medical staff are carrying on their normal work routines or idly gossiping at night time without regard for their patients is inexcusable.
The understaffing is because decades ago the AMA decided to limit the number of doctors. The AMA is run by doctors. Good for them for having power to run protectionism but I'm not going to thank them for it.
The arrogance of nurses and physicians in constantly waking patients up, completely unaware and uncaring of the health detriment that comes with loss of sleep, is inexcusable. While some people can go back to sleep after being awakened, there are many of us who have real difficulty getting back to sleep, and sometimes it doesn't happen at all.
That’s a bit to far in my opinion. I’m a physician. Now days, if you are admitted to a hospital overnight it implies you are probably pretty ill. We push hard to ensure that only patients that need to be in the hospital are (wasn’t always that way). Sometimes in sick patients, checking vitals is required (to make sure you aren’t dying). Additionally, there is evidence that hourly rounding prevents some bad outcomes like patient falls. So ‘well-meaning’ institutions like mine, mandate hourly rounding by nursing staff.
Now is this absurd in some patients, yes! In very elderly patients this may do more harm than good by causing delirium, which can be deadly...
Personally, I go out of my way to not wake anyone up, but that’s often not an option in some situations.
But to say it is doctor or nursing arrogance is to not really understand healthcare.
You know there may be other patients needs here, I recall being woken up on the higher risk renal ward, the nurses apologized but they needed to move my bed to the other side of the bay as they needed my bay (which had all the kit for monitoring) for an emergency admission.
When you overhear the nurses commenting " its xxxxx he might die in the night - you might think getting woken up is not that important.
When you are given medicines and examinations has more to do with shift changes than anything else.
For example, many doctors write prescriptions at the end of shift and neglect to put a specific time to administer on it. The nurses are then required to use the time the prescription was created as when the medicine must be provided, which is often a very inconvenient time for the patient.
If doctors received adequate training in how hospitals actually worked, in what nursing staff does, and in how they can best interact for optimum care, many of these problems could be resolved.
In the hospital you rarely get patient centric care. Instead, you get institution centric care.
This guy's channel brings up a lot of interesting points:
I had an infuriating experience with a young child in the hospital, where routine checks were being performed at the worst possible times for his sleep cycles. Sleeping is so critical to healing. Could it be that hospitals are being counterproductive, sacrificing effectiveness for efficiency?
FWIW my experience was totally different less than 9 months ago when I visited the hospital with my youngest and had to stay a few days for what ended up as a minor surgery (but still with anesthesia):
I woke up once in the night and saw a shadow with a tiny led light, carefully taking a look at the sleeping child before disappearing just as quitely.
(FWIW the nurse was there every night, but this was the only time I observed it.)
My daughter slept very well during those days, as did I.
IIRC they'd also plan with me in advance to know when the best time would be for checks and blood works, at least it came across as very thoughtful.
This was Norway, not one of the major hospitals, so not so relevant for many others except as proof that it isn't like that everywhere in the world.
My main experience with this is every time my wife gave birth. She goes through this long ordeal and is exhausted, but as long as we were there they were in every 2 hours, day and night, waking her up and talking to her. They don't seem to have any concept of people needing to sleep more than 2 hours continuously. The only thing I could come up with is that they really wanted us to get out of there ASAP and were making things a living hell to encourage us towards that end. Except, one of my rules is to follow the money and they make more money the longer we stay, so... it really doesn't make any sense.
We’ve had 4 babies in 3 different hospitals and it seems like it is really dependent on the hospital and the nursing staff. We’ve had nurses that are younger and just following the playbook all the way to nurses that are much older with several of their own children who are much more willing to use their intuition. While the nurses have all been surprisingly excellent (maybe it’s a maternity thing? That hasn’t been our experience in other parts of the hospitals) some of them are happy to let you sleep if it seems like there’s no bleeding and baby is doing well, and some of them insist on taking all the readings, though they were all apologetic while they did it.
Since we went through different hospitals, it’s hard to compare, but at the last one, it seemed like the fact that we had 3 healthy children at home already made the nurses surprisingly willing to defer to our preferences, and we got as close to a full night of sleep in the hospital with a newborn that you can get.
As an added data point, we also told the nurses at every hospital that we wanted to leave as soon as possible, so trying to kick us out wasn’t a consideration.
My wife's experience was much the same. So much that when I had an emergency appendectomy I answered every question with the goal of being discharged and not spending the night.
I was even more motivated when I overheard a phone call from a patient down the hall. It was so loud that my nurse rolled her eyes and informed me he be awake until 3am. I was sure between him and the nurses there wouldn't be any sleep in that place. I got out about 20 minute before the cutoff time for being stuck in hell.
When my wife gave birth to our daughter we had a room to stay in. Every 1.5-2 hours the nurses came in to ask questions and run tests. It was maddening. My wife had to finally cry and beg them to stop. Afterward, we managed about a few hours of uninterrupted sleep.
In the US Hospital reimbursements from insurers and medicare are per procedure, not duration of stay. Hospitals have a strong vested interest in both keeping patients alive and reducing length of stay. Food quality and sleep interruptions for non-critical patients both help the latter metric, even if that is likely not their sole reason.
My 9 year old son had a hospital stay a while ago. I stayed with him in the hospital, I got less sleep than when he was an infant with the constant interruptions....
When we returned home in the afternoon ....we both took naps.
I've recently had similar experiences with a loved one.
Older (Geriatric) friend of mine, serious medical condition, which necessitated (I'm told) continuous tests, medication & checks to be run to make sure he was in a "serious but stable" condition instead of a "on the way to death" situation.
But this was for a number of days (nearly a week) and essentially it meant the few times he was able to sleep past the pain/illness, he'd be woken up within a few hours for another round of tests, medication, etc.
He managed to get through it somehow, and I don't have any solutions to how they could have done it better (I'm no doctor), but it can't help the condition that he was getting by on one to two hours of sleep a day on top of the medical problems.
We were in the hospital for 2 nights recently. On the second day we counted how often people got in and out of the room: 29 times. We decided to return home a day earlier than planned.
About once a year I have to spend 3-7 days in the hospital (I have cystic fibrosis and a round of antibiotics are often needed to bring my lung function back to baseline). The sleep situation is one of the things that's the most unpleasant.
I wondered this a lot before. I'm lucky enough that I haven't spent much time in a hospital in my life, but visiting people there I often heard how hard it was to sleep for them due to constant interruption, noise from neighboring beds or indensive care units where it's constantly busy.
Yet on the other hand it's so often emphasized how important good sleep is for health. It seems such a nobrainer to do everything possible to make sure people can sleep well in a hospital.
Even without awakening by medical staff or sounds (ear plugs do wonders), with some illnesses patients can only sleep on their back which can be a unpleasant experience if you're used to sleeping on your side. It takes time to get accustomed to and in the mean time patients get little sleep with all mentioned effects. Pillows designed for sleeping on your back [0][1] with special curvatures for your head and neck to relax on ease falling and staying asleep. If a 10% of the patients sleep better and are released earlier from hospital or get to work faster, these pillows are a very small costs compared to costs savings, both personal & society.
Anyone seen hospitals with Orthopedic pillows? Or doctors recommending pillows for sleeping on your back?
This is a huge issue. A family member spent two weeks in the hospital last year, and one of the hardest parts of that experience was how difficult it was to sleep there. The light, the noise, the demented patient shouting in the next room, the constant interruptions and questionnaires from nurses and doctors: you just couldn't sleep more than 90 minutes if you were lucky. We called them "the bleeping machines", in the double sense. I would turn them off sometimes, because the stats they were monitoring were not life or death for us. Hospitals are a place where there is no night. The nurses working on the graveyard shift under the bright fluorescents cover a third of the day, and for them, it's just another workday, but it runs from 11pm to 7am. And they treat patients as though it is daytime. Don't get me wrong, the nurses were great, but the structure and incentives don't favor sleep. There is so much that could be done to help patients get better faster, by giving them a more restful environment. But the incentive is to monitor them until you can get them out of the bed, to save everybody money.
[+] [-] jcims|6 years ago|reply
They absolutely 100% ignore any semblance of a sleep cycle for their patients (as well as proper nutrition but that's for another day). Constant interruptions to check vitals, ask if we want to pick a meal, beeping infusion pumps, a whole squad going on rounds with banal questions...it seems to never end.
I'd like to find a watch/fitbit for her and either find or write an app that just fills the screen with a color based on her current sleep phase...green she's awake, yellow light sleep and red means she's in REM or deep sleep and should not be disturbed unless necessary. Place that by the door so the nurses can see and hopefully adjust their timing accordingly.
[+] [-] xattt|6 years ago|reply
Nurses are not there to make every patient's stay miserable. At least in my practice setting, we are extraordinarily receptive to suggestions around care and stepping in as informal advocates when families are not available.
[+] [-] AlphaWeaver|6 years ago|reply
Related to this: I looked into trying to get real time sleep data found it surprisingly hard. Fitbit, for example, only makes sleep data available after sleeping is over and the device is synced to the cloud. If anyone has a good solution to this I'm all ears.
[+] [-] bradknowles|6 years ago|reply
I also had 32db NRR earplugs that I take with me everywhere (my hearing can be very sensitive), and I used those extensively.
I got lucky and I wasn’t in the hospital for long. Once I got home, I could sleep as much as I needed.
[+] [-] brlewis|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mitchtbaum|6 years ago|reply
In a way, it shows how powerful someone is, that they could take something so valuable from another with almost no effort, and yet so lost if they would do so.
This is vital tech.
Getting started:
https://www.sleepcycle.com/how-sleep-cycle-works/
https://www.instructables.com/id/Sleep-Cycle-Alarm-Clock-wit...
https://github.com/npes-95/sleeping-beauty/wiki/Hardware-&-E...
https://github.com/npes-95/sleeping-beauty/blob/2f32d4722d3d...
https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/brain-babble/20131...
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fullpower....
https://www.businessinsider.com/does-apple-watch-track-sleep...
https://ouraring.com/
[+] [-] Scoundreller|6 years ago|reply
> a whole squad going on rounds with banal questions
I’m sure there’s a better way, but that’s par for the course for a research/teaching hospital. The patient’s room is a real-life classroom and lab, with everything that goes along with that.
[+] [-] busymom0|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] uremog|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Simple_Guy|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Engineering-MD|6 years ago|reply
The main problem I have is that I often wake up everyone else in the same bay due to lack of private rooms and the need to turn on lights and often shout at dead patients so they can hear me.
Beeping machines is a big problem, and the sooner they are made to wirelessly notify the better.
[+] [-] kdelok|6 years ago|reply
However, I wonder if you could comment on whether you think a) that you and your colleagues' approach is reflective of the broader medical community, b) you think earplugs could be feasibly issued in shared wards (from a financial/hygiene/other perspective)?
[+] [-] bregma|6 years ago|reply
Do they usually respond? Have you ever had a reply "from beyond"?
[+] [-] eitally|6 years ago|reply
That said, besides the specific reason our daughter was in-patient to address, she was otherwise vigorous and healthy, and that absolutely was not the case for the majority of the other kids no the ward, most of whom had congenital heart defects and other developmental conditions, and I can completely understand why it becomes more important to interrupt less stable patients.
[+] [-] koboll|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Theodores|6 years ago|reply
Food is another area of concern. You can starve during a hospital visit or end up broke buying supplemental calories in the shop.
Then there is the sheer difficulty of navigating the typical hospital if you are somewhat disabled or in agonising pain.
It is as if that every hospital operates at some subliminal level as a field hospital in some 19th century war. It is thoughtcrime to think of how the place is run is less than heroic. There is also triage so that people with serious problems get dealt with before those with minor ailments. Therefore it is fine to keep a lot of people waiting. Or is it?
In places that have a customer service ethos you don't keep people waiting. Apart from anything else it is just plain inefficient. The sleep thing is what I would consider inefficient. It is a given that at a typical hospital none of the patients are sleeping too well, if it is not disruption then it can be flimsy blankets. Sure any ward is not going to be your own bed, but we are way off any customer first thinking when it comes to this.
I have had discussions about this with plenty of people and the idea of customer service in healthcare is poo-pooed. Is there anywhere in the world where it has been given a try? Scandinavia? Or even Cuba? It is not rocket surgery giving the patients a good night's sleep and enjoyable food. In our private lives we recommend to others that have a big day ahead of them that they get a good night's sleep. Why does this go out the window in the world of healthcare, whether it be staff or patients?
[+] [-] Tharkun|6 years ago|reply
Hospitals are always understaffed. Doctors and nurses don't have the time to keep the sleeping schedule of all their patients into account. If you want that to change, I guess more investments in healthcare would be the way to go.
People die in hospitals every day. If you're woken up a bunch of times while recovering from something, count your blessings that you're well enough to be woken up in the first place.
[+] [-] Aromasin|6 years ago|reply
Hospitals are understaffed, but that does not mean they have an excuse to endanger patient safety by ruining their best method of recovery; sleep. Many of my friends work in sleep science. Ask any of them what they think about the current ways we treat patient sleep, and they'll go on an hour long tirade about how absolutely ridiculous it is - how there are 100s of things that we could be doing differently, but don't because of antiquated science and work dogma, and there is almost no reason for close to 50% of times we wake patients up.
I highly recommend "Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker. He puts a massive spotlight on the health implications that are cause by lack of sleep, especially for the elderly who make up the most hospital patients.
[+] [-] Sevrene|6 years ago|reply
Just because doctors and nurses have a desire to help, doesn't mean that anything they do is therefore the right thing to do. Like you said, we know that sleep is critical to healing so doesn't that go against nurses and doctors having a desire to prevent harm? I would think that something preventing healing or causing emotional stress is de-facto harm.
Yes, hospitals can be understaffed and underfunded, but that's hardly an excuse when we know some of their practises can cause harm. You wouldn't let a nurse do something harmful and let them say "Sorry we don't have the budget". We can sit here and say that yes, here's the reason but that doesn't actually mean that's what they ought to be doing.
There seems to be quite a lot of bias for doctors and nurses because they do work that is seen as very important and good. While that is true, it can often cloud judgement when deciding what we ought to do in a prescriptive medical sense. There's been many occassions where doctors or nurses were holding back advancement of their own field because they're just people and like all people they have their own faults and their own bias. I don't say this to say that doctors are bad, or cause harm, but rather that some are bad and some do cause harm, even if they're trying their best to stop you dying.
[+] [-] neor|6 years ago|reply
When my daughter of three weeks old was in the hospital she needed to get some checks at night. Some doctors would walk in with a little flashlight, do the checks and leave the room without waking her up.
Others would switch on the ultra bright hospital lighting waking up the little one, only to do checks which take 10 seconds but kept my daughter up for hours.
[+] [-] dazc|6 years ago|reply
Speaking from the UK, where this problem has been well publicised, the biggest complaint being disturbance during the night when it ought to be obvious that most people will be asleep?
Accepted there will be exceptions where patients are sleeping during the day and this does present obvious problems. However, where medical staff are carrying on their normal work routines or idly gossiping at night time without regard for their patients is inexcusable.
[+] [-] munmaek|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scarejunba|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HeraldEmbar|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshgel|6 years ago|reply
Now is this absurd in some patients, yes! In very elderly patients this may do more harm than good by causing delirium, which can be deadly...
Personally, I go out of my way to not wake anyone up, but that’s often not an option in some situations.
But to say it is doctor or nursing arrogance is to not really understand healthcare.
[+] [-] C1sc0cat|6 years ago|reply
When you overhear the nurses commenting " its xxxxx he might die in the night - you might think getting woken up is not that important.
[+] [-] tomohawk|6 years ago|reply
For example, many doctors write prescriptions at the end of shift and neglect to put a specific time to administer on it. The nurses are then required to use the time the prescription was created as when the medicine must be provided, which is often a very inconvenient time for the patient.
If doctors received adequate training in how hospitals actually worked, in what nursing staff does, and in how they can best interact for optimum care, many of these problems could be resolved.
In the hospital you rarely get patient centric care. Instead, you get institution centric care.
This guy's channel brings up a lot of interesting points:
https://www.youtube.com/user/ZDoggMD
[+] [-] darkerside|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reitanqild|6 years ago|reply
I woke up once in the night and saw a shadow with a tiny led light, carefully taking a look at the sleeping child before disappearing just as quitely.
(FWIW the nurse was there every night, but this was the only time I observed it.)
My daughter slept very well during those days, as did I.
IIRC they'd also plan with me in advance to know when the best time would be for checks and blood works, at least it came across as very thoughtful.
This was Norway, not one of the major hospitals, so not so relevant for many others except as proof that it isn't like that everywhere in the world.
[+] [-] hanniabu|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] irrational|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ksdale|6 years ago|reply
Since we went through different hospitals, it’s hard to compare, but at the last one, it seemed like the fact that we had 3 healthy children at home already made the nurses surprisingly willing to defer to our preferences, and we got as close to a full night of sleep in the hospital with a newborn that you can get.
As an added data point, we also told the nurses at every hospital that we wanted to leave as soon as possible, so trying to kick us out wasn’t a consideration.
[+] [-] twothamendment|6 years ago|reply
I was even more motivated when I overheard a phone call from a patient down the hall. It was so loud that my nurse rolled her eyes and informed me he be awake until 3am. I was sure between him and the nurses there wouldn't be any sleep in that place. I got out about 20 minute before the cutoff time for being stuck in hell.
[+] [-] bpyne|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dzink|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ayesh|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sourceless|6 years ago|reply
for which they charge facility fees
[+] [-] duxup|6 years ago|reply
When we returned home in the afternoon ....we both took naps.
[+] [-] JauntyHatAngle|6 years ago|reply
Older (Geriatric) friend of mine, serious medical condition, which necessitated (I'm told) continuous tests, medication & checks to be run to make sure he was in a "serious but stable" condition instead of a "on the way to death" situation.
But this was for a number of days (nearly a week) and essentially it meant the few times he was able to sleep past the pain/illness, he'd be woken up within a few hours for another round of tests, medication, etc.
He managed to get through it somehow, and I don't have any solutions to how they could have done it better (I'm no doctor), but it can't help the condition that he was getting by on one to two hours of sleep a day on top of the medical problems.
[+] [-] baxtr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bdcravens|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ngcc_hk|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hannob|6 years ago|reply
Yet on the other hand it's so often emphasized how important good sleep is for health. It seems such a nobrainer to do everything possible to make sure people can sleep well in a hospital.
[+] [-] smartbit|6 years ago|reply
Anyone seen hospitals with Orthopedic pillows? Or doctors recommending pillows for sleeping on your back?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthopedic_pillow#Back_sleepin...
[1] eg "Emolli Contour Memory Foam Pillow" on https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbes-finds/2019/02/21/pillows... (advertising article)
[+] [-] vonnik|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] gwright|6 years ago|reply