Implementation of Better Sleep Practices in Hospitalized Patients

How many times do we hear patients say, “no one can ever get any sleep around here” or “if you keep coming into my room every ten minutes I will never get to sleep.” Nurses as a whole know that acquiring any sleep for a patient during hospitalization is near impossible, especially getting good quality sleep. This is exactly where our first thoughts went in thinking of how we can improve patient care based on evidence-based practice to improve patients' quality of sleep. We began to think not only how crucial sleep is in the acute hospital setting but how big of an impact it makes on the healing process and human body in general. Also, without proper sleep, the body can further deteriorate when being in an already compromised position. We will further discuss the benefits and consequences of quality sleep in the paragraphs to come and what ICU nurses can do to improve the quality of care we give when it comes to our patients' sleep.