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.
Protecting Sleep in the Hospital, for Both Patients and Doctors
31–40 of 113 posts
Re: Protecting Sleep in the Hospital, for Both Patients and Doctors
#32My 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…
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.
Re: Protecting Sleep in the Hospital, for Both Patients and Doctors
#33In 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.
> not duration of stay
for which they charge facility fees
Re: Protecting Sleep in the Hospital, for Both Patients and Doctors
#34My 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…
> 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.
An accelerometer based approach (which the fitbit uses) can't actually tell the difference between someone who is just lying there still and someone who is in deep sleep.
All it can do is measure movement (which might mean they are awake, or it might mean they are in REM) and no movement.
Then it can post-process it later and use the length of stillness and the patterns/amount of movement to infer probable sleep cycles.
I don't think it's possible to get real-time sleep phase data without proper EEG sensors to measure brainwaves.
Re: Protecting Sleep in the Hospital, for Both Patients and Doctors
#35I 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…
I couldn't make sense of what you wrote until the last line. From personal experience, and reading several of the accounts here, I believe that hospitals in the US do not respect sleep, almost willfully so.
Re: Protecting Sleep in the Hospital, for Both Patients and Doctors
#36I 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…
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.
Re: Protecting Sleep in the Hospital, for Both Patients and Doctors
#37There 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…
People in for a suspected heart attack should get bacon, right? I was at a place that did it. That is either an assumption about what heart attack patients like to eat, or it is an effort to get repeat customers.
Re: Protecting Sleep in the Hospital, for Both Patients and Doctors
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
An accelerometer based approach (which the fitbit uses) can't actually tell the difference between someone who is just lying there still and someone who is in deep sleep. All it can do is measure movement (which might mean they are awake, or it might mean they are in REM) and no movement. Then it can post-process it later and use the length of stillness and the patterns/amount of movement to infer probable sleep cycl…
Maybe you could with some sort of mask that measures eye movement?
Re: Protecting Sleep in the Hospital, for Both Patients and Doctors
#39I 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…
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.
Re: Protecting Sleep in the Hospital, for Both Patients and Doctors
#40When 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: