Hospitals aren't persons, so they can't hate anything.
Nurses checking your vitals signs when necessary != hating you sleep.
Why do I hate inflammatory clickbait garbage so much?
Why Do Hospitals Hate Sleep So Much?
71–80 of 528 posts
Re: Why Do Hospitals Hate Sleep So Much?
#72The article quotes a doctor speaking about nursing care. This is as accurate as asking an automotive engineer about automobile repair. Same field, different skill sets. Nurses are trained to identify trends across many (sometimes too many) patients. Sure its inconvenient if a nurse monitors your blood pressure or oxygen levels every 2 hours after surgery, especially when you are sleeping, and especially if you recove…
> Same with audio on machines, that constant beep is annoying to you, but it means the machines are operating and you are getting your prescribed fluids - silence on a night ward is a sign something is wrong, and quickly precedes an emergency alarm. Sure, if there is one source of beeps, then no beeps would be conspicuous, but when there are many things all beeping, having one of them stop beeping may not be so obvio…
Central monitors are quite common. There are even entire units based on it (telemetry).
Re: Why Do Hospitals Hate Sleep So Much?
#73Re: Why Do Hospitals Hate Sleep So Much?
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seems like it’s backward to me. The machine should be silent if everything is ok and start beeping if things are going wrong.
This makes me think about data backups. It might make sense to only get a notification if a backup failed, but then how do you know the backup system is actually functioning at all?
Regularly restoring from backup?
Re: Why Do Hospitals Hate Sleep So Much?
#75The article quotes a doctor speaking about nursing care. This is as accurate as asking an automotive engineer about automobile repair. Same field, different skill sets. Nurses are trained to identify trends across many (sometimes too many) patients. Sure its inconvenient if a nurse monitors your blood pressure or oxygen levels every 2 hours after surgery, especially when you are sleeping, and especially if you recove…
> Same with audio on machines, that constant beep is annoying to you, but it means the machines are operating and you are getting your prescribed fluids This article is a terrible treatment of the issue. The NYT article [1] or actual research papers are far better. To try and sum up the actual issue that's being discussed: it's a tragedy of the commons situation, where the commons is a patient's sleep. Every device a…
> There is little effort to batch interactions
The nurses are highly incentivized to batch interactions, just like waitstaff. What you don't see is that if the nurse has is working on the batch for patient A, and patient B crashes, then the nurse is too tied down to respond and calls in a colleague, who shows up to crashing patient B and tries to get up to speed.
Re: Why Do Hospitals Hate Sleep So Much?
#76For the birth of my second child, I learned to manage hospital staff so that they would leave my wife and newborn alone unless there was an emergency. I proactively scheduled scans, vital checks for the next morning so that the patients could rest. The experience was so much better than what my wife and first child had. I do not understand why hospitals cannot do this kind of considerate scheduling by default.
Can you elaborate on how you worked with the hospital staff to make this "considerate scheduling" possible? My initial feeling would be that the staff will do their jobs when it convenient for them to do it, regardless of when you would prefer them to do it. How did you manage to convince them to modify their scheduling?
Probably by asking, or skipping tests/interventions. Ultimately everything is patient’s choice.
It may work okay (administering one patient’s daily meds last amongst the caseload of patients).
Other times, by deferring the 6AM blood draw to 10AM could mean your providers don’t have a fresh picture of the patient’s condition during morning rounds.
Re: Why Do Hospitals Hate Sleep So Much?
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m sure you’re right, but being unable to sleep when you need to heal is bad . "It’s complicated" is not a get-out-of-jail-free card.
May I weigh in with an outside perspective? My impression is this is a cultural issue, i.e. Americans are very insensitive to noisy disturbances during sleep hours. Biggest examples for me are your freight trains. Deadly accidents? Sure, the only solution is to disturb sveryone in a 5 mile radius around each crossing. In my home country this is unthinkable. People get chewed up, sometimes called the police on, for ev…
I'll never forget the night I was visited by police in northern Norway because we committed the crime of ... haymaking at 11 pm.
Re: Why Do Hospitals Hate Sleep So Much?
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
To me the beeping also seemed like a quality backwards solution where much better, seemingly obvious solutions exist. Reality is probably much more complicated though. In a solution like you described and I had in my head we'd need a agreed upon protocol between IV drip and monitoring device. Probably the same standard should be used by other, similar devices. If that doesn't happen we get vendor lock in. In addition…
> In a solution like you described and I had in my head we'd need a agreed upon protocol between IV drip and monitoring device. Probably the same standard should be used by other, similar devices. If that doesn't happen we get vendor lock in. And a vendor lock-in is the goal of the vendor, both in medical and consumer space! Which is why such protocols rarely happen in either.
The medical space has a surprising number of widely used protocols. If you’ve ever gotten a CD with the raw data from some scan, it probably had a crappy proprietary viewer and the raw data. The raw data is almost invariably DICOM, and there are plenty of open-source viewers.
I suspect there are strong economic factors here. When a hospital buys a $2M imaging machine, the vendor is making money on the machine, not on ads, and that $2M machine had better interoperate with the HIPAA-compliant image archiving and distribution system the hospital already has from some other vendor.
Re: Why Do Hospitals Hate Sleep So Much?
#79My wife just finished up a 22 hour labor and is desperately trying to get some sleep but the nurses refuse to stop yelling and laughing directly outside of her door. It’s not even medical. Just rude.
Nurses cluck in packs like chickens, completely without concern for patients interrupting their social hour. You have to order them around because they're not smart or conscientious enough to do that on their own. If they were smarter, they would be doctors. They don't have empathy, so you have to pull rank or use a stick, because a carrot won't work.
Would you please stop posting ragey rants, or any unsubstantive comments, to Hacker News? It's not what we're going for here.
Re: Why Do Hospitals Hate Sleep So Much?
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
The nurse desk is a SPoF. If something goes wrong with that area, then how can you tell each monitoring machine is working?
The nurse desk is a desk . If the desk literally fails, you have serious issues, and your average multiple person desk is well enough engineered that there isn’t a single piece that can fail and take out the entire desk. But there are generally multiple nurses at the nurse desk, and there are often multiple desks, too. Also, you could hook the monitoring system up to the PA system. edit: when I say hooking it to the…
Network failure in the desk room sounds like a complete outage for that.