I asked my doctor relative about this once and IIRC they basically said because hospitals are not hotels - if you're inpatient in America you're pretty sick and more than likely need periodic monitoring for your condition. As soon as you're well enough to be sleeping for long periods of time without observation you'll get bounced.
The article's premise was that you can maintain the current quality of monitoring while increasing sleep quality with simple changes, and that increasing sleep quality will improve the patient's recovery.
Start earning $90/hourly for working online from your home for few hours each day... Get regular payment on a weekly basis... All you need is a computer, internet connection and a litte free time... Read more here...
--->>> http://Careers7.com
I asked my doctor relative about this once and IIRC they basically said because hospitals are not hotels - if you're inpatient in America you're pretty sick and more than likely need periodic monitoring for your condition. As soon as you're well enough to be sleeping for long periods of time without observation you'll get bounced.
You can be a patient and be so sick of the noise that you decide you want to opt out of the monitoring - or you DIY anyway, as most hospital do not take requests kindly.
I was once in ICU. The cardiac monitor was beeping loudly whenever I was starting to sleep.
After the first few time woke me up in pain, I bent over and pushed the button to power off the cardiac monitor. Problem solved! I fully admitted all the risks - but there comes a time when too much is just too much.
> 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…
> The medical space has a surprising number of widely used protocols.
There are also a wide range of interpretations of a single protocol. See the horror of HL7.
In terms of DICOM viewers, I’ll be the one who mentions Horos. If it doesn’t do what you want with a DICOM or have a plug-in that does, you are doing something quite unusual. Before the psych department come at me - I work in radiology. Functional imaging is best served with other tools, and I don’t understand them.
For both of our children, the hospital caused us more stress and discomfort than anything else. Newborn baby's finally asleep, wife is comfortable re pain, finally start to get some sleep. Then the nurse comes in at 2 am, writes her name on the board, asks us questions that they should have the answer to, then leaves. Nurse change 3x a day, baby doctor checking in to ask if were ok, mom doctor doing the same, house k…
A key lesson I learned with our first child was "just about everything gets easier once you leave the hospital", so with our second we prioritized GTFOing ASAP. It was a good decision.
I'm lucky enough never to have been in hospital myself, but FWIW: I was recently on the jury in a coroner's inquest. A patient had died suddenly in his sleep in hospital. The solicitor whose agenda was to make the hospital look bad aimed to suggest that nurses should have been entering his room every 15 minutes to check his breathing, but all medical staff witnesses argued that sleep is too important to disrupt by en…
I know a torch is a flashlight but it amuses me to think of a nurse wielding a flaming torch walking down the hallway, peering into rooms.
It's been awhile since I was in a hospital overnight but checking in on a (presumably) stable patient every 15 minutes is madness. You hear all sorts of crazy things during jury duty--I love it.
My parents worked in Italian hospitals for 40 years and their experience is the exact opposite: patients ask for more care then it is necessary while they often complain when some test is mandatory.
If you leave them alone, they'll complain they're being abandoned and not taken care of, if you go for a blood test, they complain that it's not what they need.
Hospitals have rules to allow patient's recovery, they need to work for the general case, when you are 24 hours a day in a bed, you have plenty of time to sleep and usually the stress of the situation is enough to disrupt the patient's regular sleep cycle, so they don't sleep well anyway.
For having spent a long time in hospital (France), I can tell that the beeps of the machines are completely useless. It is maybe very ok for someone spending 2 or 3 days in the hospital, but for people spending 3 to 6 or even more months in hospital (this was the case here), it is completely terrible and the sleep deprivation goes against any good care practice.
Situation is the following:
- First you have beeps every few seconds in a floor with 20 or 30 rooms. The beeps, after a few days working in the hospital, is just a common noise for nurses and doctors. The human brain is wired to ignore repetitive noise in your environment. Basically no one cares about the beeps after a few weeks in the hospital, and the beeps turn into routine noise. They should be exceptional to be an alarm. Constant alarm is not an alarm anymore.
- Then there is no way to tell if the beeps are serious (dysfunction or else) or irrelevant. For example infusion pumps beep 2/3 minutes before ending as pre-alarm, then beeps when ending the infusion, and keep beeping until a nurse stops it. If you are in a room with 5 infusion pumps delivering medicines and one heart rate monitor with high and low alarms, you are guaranteed to get beeps in the room almost constantly, which kills the whole point for the beeps in the first place. They become useless. It is even counter productive. Not mentioning beeps of low-battery for infusion pumps or other devices which are plug into A/C. Very often the beeps cannot be de-activated, so the medical device vendor is safe for a legal point of view.
- children spending 3 or 6 months in hospital are seriously impacted by the 6 to 9 wake-ups during the night. Every kid with a leukemia or other form of cancer spends 3 to 6 months in hospital at least. This is a lot of kids (about 15 000 per year in the US). Nothing is done to help those kids sleep better during those months in hospital. they have a double burden: cancer and sleep deprivation.
It is obvious patients should be monitored, but today we must admit sleep is the least of worry for all caregivers and medical devices vendors. It is possible today to design sleep-friendly monitoring devices. Machines states can be displayed on a central deck, nurses and doctors can have a smartphone or smartwatch with alarms connected to the machines, machines could only beeps when a care giver is in the room thanks to NFC, blinking lights in the corridor could be used as well.Stupid questions that are in the patient file should be answered in front of the computer, not at 2 a.m. during the night.
In any case too much noise is bad for the patients and kills the whole point of an alarm.
For both of our children, the hospital caused us more stress and discomfort than anything else. Newborn baby's finally asleep, wife is comfortable re pain, finally start to get some sleep. Then the nurse comes in at 2 am, writes her name on the board, asks us questions that they should have the answer to, then leaves. Nurse change 3x a day, baby doctor checking in to ask if were ok, mom doctor doing the same, house k…
We had our first child ~3 months ago. We had a room to ourselves and nurses/midwifes would only come in once or twice a day unless they were paged (which we did, they were a godsend). This made the stay as comfortable as could be, and we could get all the quiet time alone we wanted, although sleep was in short supply for other reasons.
This was in Copenhagen, Denmark, so the entire stay was free. Sadly, the central hospital is removing this practice and kicking out patients after 4 hours.