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.
Protecting Sleep in the Hospital, for Both Patients and Doctors
81–90 of 113 posts
Re: Protecting Sleep in the Hospital, for Both Patients and Doctors
#82I’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…
> often shout at dead patients so they can hear me Do they usually respond? Have you ever had a reply "from beyond"?
I assumed he meant, recently deceased. I imagined this was part of trying to revive the very recently deceased person.
Re: Protecting Sleep in the Hospital, for Both Patients and Doctors
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Hey that's extremely generous of you...thank you! It will probably take some time as I'm looking at various bits of hardware to experiment with, but if I get stuck I very well may reach out to see if you have a few cycles to assist. Much appreciated!
Also throwing my name in the hat if you want an extra hand on the Android development part! It seems like such a great solution to a problem that occurs all too often
Re: Protecting Sleep in the Hospital, for Both Patients and Doctors
#84My 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 maki…
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.
Re: Protecting Sleep in the Hospital, for Both Patients and Doctors
#85My 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 maki…
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.
Re: Protecting Sleep in the Hospital, for Both Patients and Doctors
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
They still do, or did in 2015 and 2018. We were lucky enough to not need the doctor-led hospital unit - using the midwife-led maternity unit instead (where private rooms are standard). However, we were moments away from foreceps being used - a doctor-administered intervention - for the first birth, which would have necessitated a move downstairs to the hospital wing, and thus a ward or payment for a private room.
Forceps? I thought that forceps had been replaced by sink plungers. Obviously not the sort you buy in the DiY store but the expensive medical grade. The same principle applies though, suction cup goes on baby's head and with one pull the baby is born! I thought the suction cup approach was standard now with the benefit to the technique being no birth marks.
Yep - were going for forceps instead of ventouse.
Re: Protecting Sleep in the Hospital, for Both Patients and Doctors
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This isn't universally true. I'm happy to report that the Cardiac Surgery step-down unit at Boston Children's does a fantastic job working with families to determine the least intrusive modes of nursing care based on their needs & condition.
Thanks, that's good to know! The topic was discussed here a few months ago [0]. It's probably difficult to get the data required for a systematic discussion...
Re: Protecting Sleep in the Hospital, for Both Patients and Doctors
#88When 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.
Our experience as well. I was in the room as well the whole time and it was ridiculous how often somebody came in to do something.
With exception of one nurse, every single person pushed back against us asking for fewer interruptions and said it was for the baby and mom. One nurse basically acted like my spouse was acting entitled for wanting to sleep. I wanted to swear at that nurse and throw her out of the room.
One of the night nurses realized my spouse was about to collapse and found a way to let her sleep for 3 hours.
Re: Protecting Sleep in the Hospital, for Both Patients and Doctors
#89Stayed in the hospital in April for about a week for a colon resection - without a doubt worst sleep is in a hospital. It was an amazing environment too and I only had 11:00pm and 4:00am checks. I think it's the nature of the environment.
Re: Protecting Sleep in the Hospital, for Both Patients and Doctors
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 passion…
If they're waking you up to take blood samples when you're sleeping, it's probably for good reason. Maybe the patient is at risk for some kind of kidney complications and maybe not dying from renal failure is more important than getting a good night's sleep. There could be any number of reasons for this. Maybe another patient had some kind of emergency that had to be dealt with first, and your sleep schedule is less…
The blood checks I brought up because this was a thing specifically criticised by my friends in the medical trade. For the vast majority of cases where they need to take blood, it just so happens to be the preferred method used for diagnosing the patient, not the only method. There are other things that can be done beyond waking the patient and sticking a needle in their arm. Often they just end up disposing it, as they don't even have the resources to test the blood of every patient every hour; but they will continue to take blood every hour. If the nurses are told to take blood, they will do it to protocol - regardless of what common sense might suggest.
The main criticism they had was that of treatment for patients with infection. It's nice for a doctor to know whether the body is fighting it off effectively or not. Many doctors will ask for blood tests every hour because it's so nice to know, and you'll get a pretty graph to tell you what's going on by the hour. You know what's better than a graph? Letting the patient fight off said infection. Best way to do that? Decent sleep. Apparently the education on sleep is abysmal in most institutions currently, purely because it's been a branch of medicine that has bloomed late, and it has resulted in doctors who often don't give sleep the respect it deserves.
Again, this is not from the horses mouth. I am only passing on the information my friends gave me as effectively and accurately as I can. I'm not trying to shit on those in the medical profession, as it's a career I envy, but it is something that is a chronic issue in most wards and many sleep specialists across the globe are trying their hardest to rectify it with significant push back.