????#552: Why Hospitals Should Let You Sleep
If part of a hospital stay is to recover from a procedure or illness, why is it so hard to get any rest?
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There is more noise and light than is conducive for sleep. And nurses and others visit frequently to give medications, take vitals, draw blood or perform tests and checkups — in many cases waking patients to do so.
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Some monitoring is necessary, of course. Medication must be given; some vital signs do need to be checked. And frequent monitoring is warranted for some patients — such as those in intensive care units. But others are best left mostly alone. Yet many hospitals don’t distinguish between the two, disrupting everyone on a predefined schedule.
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Peter Ubel understands the problem as both a physician and patient. When he spent a night in the hospital recovering from surgery in 2013, he was interrupted multiple times by blood draws, vital sign checks, other lab tests, as well as by the beeping of machines. “Not an hour went by without some kind of disruption,” said Ubel, a physician with Duke University. “It’s a terrible way to start recovery.”
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It’s more than annoying — such disruptions can harm patients. Short sleep durations are associated with reduced immune function, delirium, hypertension and mood disorders. Hospital conditions, including sleep disruptions, may contribute to “posthospital syndrome” — the period of vulnerability to a host of health problems after hospitalization that are not related to the reason for that hospitalization.
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“In addressing a patient’s acute illness, we may inadvertently be causing harm by ignoring the important restorative powers of a healing environment,” said Harlan Krumholz, a Yale University physician who has been calling attention to posthospital syndrome for several years. “The key to a successful recovery after illness may be a less stressful, more supportive, more humane experience during the hospitalization.”
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It’s an environment that, all too often, seems set up for everyone else’s convenience but the patient’s. To help patients deal with the stresses of hospitalization, sedatives are often prescribed. These medications, including opioids, carry their own risks, such as addiction.
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“Instead, we could make the environment more conducive to rest and reduce the use of sedatives,” Ubel said.
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Solutions aren’t hard to fathom. Ubel listed some in 2013. Hospital workers could coordinate so that one disruption serves multiple needs: a blood draw and a vitals check at the same time instead of two hours apart.
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Or they could allow patients’ needs to guide schedules. If a patient is at low risk and can go six or eight hours without a vitals check, for example, perhaps don’t do that check once every four hours.
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Source article: https://paper.udn.com/udnpaper/POH0067/337387/web/
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