Table 6.

Suggestions by clinical staff regarding sleep improvement

Reschedule and Clustering of Care “I think you can change the timing of AM labs. I don’t think they really need their blood drawn at 1:00 am.” (staff, 7007) “I think we can reschedule medications a little bit overnight, maybe we don’t need to assess the ventilators so frequently overnight. Blood gases should be drawn if there’s a clinical need and we should not just do random blood gas in the middle of the night just to check, unless there’s a clinical change in the patients. The same goes with scanning. ” (staff, 7004) “You can work really well with some nurses and doctors to try to have a specific hands-on time where a patients need a specific medication at a special time and respiratory can go in there at time and the physician can go in there at that time” (staff, 7002) “Definitely cluster the care. We should try to go into the patient’s room together to do all of our tasks.” (staff, 7004) “Trying to get everything done in the beginning of the nightshift I think is huge. Trying to get their baths and everything done early so that you are not waking them up at 3, 4 in the morning to bathe them.” (staff, 7018)

Staff education “First we have to educate the staff about the importance of sleep because you could have the quiet kit but if you don’t know the importance of sleep you are less likely to use it…so I think training and education is the best to provide better sleep for the patient” (staff, 7017) “I think it would require explaining to us why it’s important, using data. And then giving suggestions about when it would be most important to be done and how we can kind of circumvent the problems that it would create” (staff, 7012)