Sleep Deprivation in Hospitals Is a Real Problem
The importance of sleep is perhaps most realized when we become sick. When we are hospitalized and most in need of every ounce of health, though, hospital care practically guarantees that we won’t get good sleep. Fortunately, two approaches hold promise to improve sleep for patients: one organizational, and the other a common trick of the trade among those of us working in behavioral economics.
Recently I was all-too-miserably reminded of the challenges of hospital sleep when I spent a fitful night recovering from surgery to remove a small kidney tumor. Unlike some patients in that situation, my sleep was not disturbed by pain or nausea; I was lucky to avoid both of those postoperative complications. Instead, my sleep was interrupted, hourly, by clinicians taking care of me. There were vital sign checks every four hours, a frequency that makes sense given that I had just had part of my left kidney removed. Sometimes sleep interruptions are necessary in order to monitor patient conditions. But those vital sign checks, at midnight and 4 a.m., were not the only interruptions I experienced that night. At 3 a.m., if my very foggy memory serves me correctly, someone came into my room to draw blood for follow-up laboratory tests. Several other times that evening, the machine hovering near my left ear beeped to tell me that one of my IV medications had run out; I would push the nursing button and tell the person at the desk about the beeping, and eventually someone would come in and either replace the empty IV bag or turn the alarm off.
Between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m., I did not go more than an hour without some kind of interruption… (Read more and view comments at The Atlantic)