Como dormir en hospitales

Good sleep is essential to healing. When we don't sleep well, our bodies' immune system and ability to heal wounds and other types of tissue damage is reduced. When you are recovering from surgery or illness, sleep is what the doctor ordered.

Except that in hospitals, sleep is rarely what the doctor ordered. Patients, especially those in intensive care units (ICUs), are monitored continually and even woken up during the night and at other times when they are sleeping. This factor made researchers wonder if the quantity and quality of sleep in the ICU was good enough to promote fast healing.

Researchers studies 16 ICU patients for 24 hours. They monitored the patients' sleep during that time. Most of the sleep that patients got was stage 1 and stage 2 sleep (light types of sleep that do not refresh the same as the deeper stages of sleep). This is likely because the brain will not go into deep sleep if it needs to monitor activities and unusual things.

Part of the reason for this lack of sleep could be simply because patients are in pain from surgery, but the hospital procedures themselves undoubtedly contribute to the poor quality of patient's sleep. This reason also includes the fact that there is too much light and noise and no way for a patient to reset his "internal clock" because of lack of sunlight (the sunlight exposure from just a window isn't always enough to reset a person's internal clock).

Improving Sleep in Hospitals

A lot can be done in hospitals to help patients sleep, which could speed recovery time and reduce costs (due to shorter hospital stays). Paying attention to sleep and creating monitoring procedures and room that encourage sleep is the first step.

Read these Tips on Hospital Sleep.

_Source:

_{Friese, Randall S. MD; Diaz-Arrastia, Ramon MD, PhD; McBride, Dara RN; Frankel, Heidi MD; Gentilello, Larry M. MD . Quantity and Quality of Sleep in the Surgical Intensive Care Unit: Are Our Patients Sleeping?. Journal of Trauma-Injury Infection & Critical Care. 63(6):1210-1214, December 2007.}