Then my oldest son was in the hospital for a while. He was sick so I wasn't too surprised he was napping all the time until spent a few nights sleeping at the hospital with him and realized he was probabbly napping constantly in the day because the nurses would wake him, and me.... constantly all night.

When we went home we both crashed and napped a bit and then slept all night... i swear he recovered faster after catching up on sleep at home.

It’s not even medical. Just rude.

1. My surgery affected my nervous system and thyroid; maintaining blood flow (especially in my legs) was important.

2. Knowing how I felt at the time kept the nurses informed about the dosage of medicine they should administer. Hormones and their effects can change rapidly.

3. Having a patient awake for blood draws, or an emergency, is useful. I’m not a small person; turning me over for some blood is much easier if I am awake and cooperative.

I can imagine anyone with recent head trauma shouldn’t be allowed to sleep either.

Ask your doctor (and nurses!) to keep you informed and educated about your situation. You're responsible for yourself. Medicine isn’t always intuitive, especially if you’re not yourself yet.

The experience was so much better than what my wife and first child had. I do not understand why hospitals cannot do this kind of considerate scheduling by default.

Maybe hospitals just have a vendetta on sleep in general?

Nurses are trained to identify trends across many (sometimes too many) patients. Sure its inconvenient if a nurse monitors your blood pressure or oxygen levels every 2 hours after surgery, especially when you are sleeping, and especially if you recover perfectly.

But if you have a post-op internal bleed that occurs during the night, when you are asleep and unable to let someone know you are feeling woozy (because you are asleep), that's when trouble occurs. Frequent observations mean nurses can identify when things are going south before you get to an emergency situation.

Blood pressure drops sharply over 2 hours, monitor every 15 minutes, see if it stabilises. If it doesn't raise the alarm quickly.

Same with audio on machines, that constant beep is annoying to you, but it means the machines are operating and you are getting your prescribed fluids - silence on a night ward is a sign something is wrong, and quickly precedes an emergency alarm.

Then the nurse comes in at 2 am, writes her name on the board, asks us questions that they should have the answer to, then leaves.

Nurse change 3x a day, baby doctor checking in to ask if were ok, mom doctor doing the same, house keeping, meal people 3x a day. Plus any legitimate and needed medical attention e.g. baby shots/bath /moms wound dressing change

With our second, insurance would've covered another 2-3 days in the hospital, but my wife nearly had a mental breakdown between normal post partum depression, nursing difficulties, and people interrupting every quiet moment we have with our new family member, so we left asap.

Aside from the first day/night after surgery, I’ve never felt like Hospitals are against slept?!?

My Wife had a c-section in October. Again, other than first day/night after surgery, never felt like we were interrupted all the time.

Is this article about America or something?

I do agree with the OP. The thing that mystified me was that I was told I had to rest while under observation (for a non _too_ serious condition), but my night there was anything but restful.

I get that the nurses had to come around every 4 hours to change my antibiotic and saline IV drip, and to give me painkillers - but outside of that the constant beeping and general noise and chatter of the medical staff was incessant. IV drip controllers were left in 'alarm' state for 15 minutes at a time so I could hear constant loud beeps that are purely intended to get attention.

To top it off, the night staff forgot to turn off the main lights in the ward, and it wasn't until 4am that I heard someone say "Oops, we forgot to turn off the lights!" and they did so, making the ward finally dark enough to sleep.

Generally, the care I received was great, but I was mystified at how hard it was to actually get some basic sleep, which I consider vital for recovery, under those conditions.

It is much easier to confirm that the patient is ok if they are awake. When the nurse softly asks "do you feel ok?" when drawing blood in the night, it is not just meant as soothing, but just as much to check if further treatment is required.

It's a bit like the soldier checking if there is a bullet in the chamber when picking up a gun. Even if you experience a gun that goes off by acciden only once, it becomes really easy to understand the thousands of times the soldier will do this when he knows there is no bullet there.

Another trend that I know of in the Netherlands (where I'm from) is that newly built hospitals have private rooms for all patients. These hospitals no longer have shared rooms by design. They also try to minimize hospital stays as being in a hospital exposes you to hospital infections, is expensive, and to be avoided unless explicitly needed.

That's a big difference with Germany, which is old fashioned on this front. The default attitude in Germany seems to be to keep people in a hospital much longer. In Germany you only get a private room if you need it medically or if you take private insurance.

I suspect a lot of this stuff is part cultural and part wrongly aligned incentives because hospitals just bill whatever to insurers and couldn't care less about patient comfort because their paying customer is the insurer, not the patient. The insurer cares about cost, the hospital cares about milking the insurer to the maximum of their ability. Between those two, patient comfort is not much of a concern.

The reason things have improved in the Netherlands is that they spent the last decade realigning incentives to cut cost between insurers and hospitals. People pick their own insurer (they are all private). However, all insurers are required to offer the same base packages (with extras if you want). So, people can easily switch insurance provider if they want and they do. So, insurers now compete on quality of service and cost. Which is why a lot of hospitals are actively concerning them selves with upgrading their facilities to improve customer happiness (still the insurers). Insurers are happy when their customers don't switch to another insurer and when hospitals don't waste their money.

I'm certainly not a medical expert nor a sleep expert, but I'd wager if nurses and doctors would let their patients have a full night of rest without interruption, they would see much faster recovery times.

Lots of things are "easy to figure out", and also "really hard to implement correctly".

Managing the care of a lot of different people with different conditions over long periods of time is complex and error-prone. You can't stand around all day in a hospital trying to figure out if you missed an edge case in a patient's customized care plan. Not only are you tremendously busy, but making a mistake in that customized plan could mean life or death. Routine is much safer and more reliable.

It's not impossible to improve patient care, but it is tremendously more difficult than a layman can observe just by sitting in a hospital bed.

- Elementary school starting so early all the kids are half asleep in class.

- College + Sleep? Not gonna happen.

- 24 hour construction in certain part of NYC, check!

- Most cities quiet hours are very precisely 8 hours. Hope your days start at 6:30/7:00 and you're falling asleep precisely at 11pm, and all your neighbors do the same!

- Having attention deficit? Lets start with ADHD medecine, not with a sleep study, no sir.

- Bazillion jobs requiring on call, waking people up at all manner of time, as a standard thing.

- Neighbors woke you up? Toughen up bro!

- Myth around how so many people apparently can do just fine on 5 hours of sleep.

The hospital thing is just a symptom of a society built around lack of respect for sleep. No one seems to consider it an important thing. If you're drowsy because you couldn't sleep, it's considered a minor inconvenience and little more.

I learned about this by watching a video put out by a hospitalist who was showing the results of requiring new doctors to be paired up with nurses for a week or two to see how hospitals actually worked. The new doctors were very surprised that their mental model of things just wasn't grounded in reality.

This all stems from institution centric care rather than patient centric care.

"I'm not a software engineer, but here's my full breakdown on where you are all going wrong based on using a BBC Micro for a week back in 1993"

My initial feeling would be that the staff will do their jobs when it convenient for them to do it, regardless of when you would prefer them to do it. How did you manage to convince them to modify their scheduling?

Sure, if there is one source of beeps, then no beeps would be conspicuous, but when there are many things all beeping, having one of them stop beeping may not be so obvious at all.

A simple technological solution seems appropriate here. Have each machine that needs to work check in every couple seconds with each of two centralized monitoring machines. Have each monitoring machine alert the nurse desk if a monitored machine stops checking in. This is silent and has no single point of failure.

Talk to the charge nurse to change rooms, escalate to the admin on call if needed. Get the sleep now while you can.

I had a very severe head impact couple of years back, and while I was fuzzy at the time of impact, few hours before I go to bed, it was not until the day after when, my internal functions went half way south. I am not certain if the weakening of some of my external senses immediately happened or not.

For our first child, for the first 24 hours or so postpartum, my wife and child both needed something checked every couple hours.

Our overnight nurse said something like "I'll be doing your wife's checks at midnight and 2am, and your baby's at 1am and 3am". When I asked if my wife and child could be checked in the same entries, it turned out they could. I was surprised the hospital didn't do it by default that way for less time sensitive checks.

This article is a terrible treatment of the issue. The NYT article [1] or actual research papers are far better.

To try and sum up the actual issue that's being discussed: it's a tragedy of the commons situation, where the commons is a patient's sleep.

Every device and procedure priorities derisking above ALL else. In aggregate, this results in a huge negative impact on sleep.

The suggested change in behavior is to simply prioritize quality sleep somewhere about "irrelevant."

From the original research, a few points (from memory):

- Outcomes for non-critical patients are not substantially improved by the "every 2(?) hour vital check" regime. It's followed mostly because of legacy medical inertia

- There is little effort to batch interactions

- A substantial amount of sleep-disrupting noise is a modern hospital is non-functional

From personal experience at a good cancer research hospital in a major city, one omnipresent alarm was a low battery warning... for a device that was plugged into mains power. No one knew how to turn it off or fix it.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/03/upshot/why-hospitals-shou...

Not to mention "PAGING RESPOND MET CALL CODE BLUE"[0] followed by a crash cart tearing off down the hallway at 4am, and of course once you've been in the hospital for a few days you know that "MET call" means someone is probably dying and "code blue" means it's from cardiopulmonary arrest, which doesn't really help soothe you back to sleep.

[0] the jargon is probably wrong

I was once in ICU. The cardiac monitor was beeping loudly whenever I was starting to sleep.

After the first few time woke me up in pain, I bent over and pushed the button to power off the cardiac monitor. Problem solved! I fully admitted all the risks - but there comes a time when too much is just too much.

I then had a great night of sleep :-)

This was in Copenhagen, Denmark, so the entire stay was free. Sadly, the central hospital is removing this practice and kicking out patients after 4 hours.

so really, this is just a same-industry product plug.

> I can imagine anyone with recent head trauma shouldn’t be allowed to sleep either.

Well, yes, it would be enormously practical in a large number of situations if we wouldn't sleep. It would also solve a lot of problems if we didn't need to eat. Problem is, those things are biological necessaries with immediate adverse effects if we neglect them. I also believe there is a solid body of research showing the importance of sleep for recovery.

I'm not a doctor or nurse and the blood flow argument does sound reasonable - however, the other two arguments sound a lot like "it's more practical and less risky for us if you're awake", which I don't see is a valid reason. Also, by what medical school is >45 minutes of uninterrupted sleep "too much"?

  > Same with audio on machines, that constant beep is annoying to you,
  > but it means the machines are operating and you are getting your
  > prescribed fluids - silence on a night ward is a sign something is
  > wrong, and quickly precedes an emergency alarm.