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Background & Aim: One of the responsibilities of nurses is to identify of effective factors on sleeping, because identification of these factors prevents from occurrence of sleep disorders, improves sleeping, decreases duration of hospitalization, and reduces use of hypnotic drugs.

Methods & Materials: This research is a comparative descriptive study. The population under research was included 50 nurses who were working in CCU wards and 50 patients who were hospitalized in CCU wards that were selected by interviewing and information gathering tools was a questionnaires which consisted of tow parts and for each group one questionnaire was used. The first part was included demographic specification. Second part is consisted of 56 questions (four rating) related to effective factors on patient&aposs sleeping in the domains such as environmental factors, personal (physical and mental) factors, pre-sleeping habits and an extra question (to explain other factors with the except of factors that mentioned in sleeping). Gathered data is processed by SPSS software, 12&aposTh version, and for achieving to research goals, descriptive and perceptive statistical methods (such as t-test, ANOVA test, and Pearson coefficient of correlation) were used. Then descriptive statistic was used in data analysis and statistical t-tests were used to compare of these two groups opinions.

Results: The results of this research showed that environmental factors such as turned on light, pain, anxiety due to loss of job, fears of outcome of disease, connection to monitoring systems are the important effective factors on sleeping according to the nurses points of view however patients believe that phone ring, pain, anxiety from loss of job, fears of outcomes of disease, connection to monitoring systems are important.

Conclusion: According to the research results, the most important effective factors on sleeping are "turned on light", "phone ring" "pain", "anxiety from loss of job", "fears of outcome of illness", "connection to monitoring systems". The foundation of this schedule is based on identification of effective factors on sleeping according to viewpoint of patients and then eliminating the disturbing factors.

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Background & Aim: Poor sleep quality is a common problem among patients hospitalized in the CCUs. This study aimed to determine the effect of environmental factors modification strategies on quality of sleep among patients admitted to CCU.

Methods & Materials: This was a quasi-experimental study with a single-blinded design. Sixty patients admitted to the CCU of Shariati hospital were divided into two experiment and control groups. Sleep quality was measured in the first day of admission and three days later using the Pittsburgh sleep quality index in both groups. In the intervention group, we implemented a modified work environment between the two measurements. Data were analyzed using the Chi-squared and t-test in the SPSS v.18.

Results: Findings showed a significant decrease in sleep quality in the control group after hospitalization, compared with the intervention group (P<0.001). There were no statistically significant changes in the sleep quality before and after hospitalization in the intervention group (P=0.053).

Conclusion: Using environmental factors mitigation strategies can improve sleep quality of patients admitted to CCUs.

 

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Background & Aim: Patient monitoring in cardiac intensive care unit (CICU) is considered to be non-invasive and safe, but it can cause unintentional catastrophic consequences due to the alarm fatigue. The aim of the study was to determine the status of monitoring system alarms and nurses’ alarm fatigue.
Methods & Materials: This descriptive, cross-sectional study was carried out in cardiac intensive care units of a hospital in Fars province from January to March 2019. The alarm status of 24 monitoring devices was observed for 100 hours in 100 patients under the physiological monitoring. Patients under monitoring were included in the study using a continuous and convenience sampling. Also, 62 nurses working in five CICUs of this hospital completed the alarm fatigue questionnaire (through census). The data obtained from the observation and the questionnaires were analyzed by the SPSS software version 16 using descriptive statistics.
Results: The auditory alarms of monitoring devices were turned off and only visual alarms could be recorded. In the visual alarms recorded during 100 hours, 131 alarms (53.47%) were technical, followed by the false, nuisance, and ultimately real or actual alarms with rates of 40 (16.33%), 38 (15.51%) and 36 (14.69%), respectively. The mean (and standard deviation) score of alarm fatigue among nurses was 21.04 (7.52), and the alarm fatigue score for %50 of nurses was higher than the average score.
Conclusion: Turning off the auditory alarms can lead to serious risks to patients. Also, a high proportion of technical, nuisance, and false alarms can cause alarm fatigue in nurses. Adopting solutions in accordance with standard guidelines and checking physiological monitoring devices in hospitals are necessary in order to reduce false, nuisance, and technical alarms. Failure to pay attention to these issues leads to the alarm fatigue among nurses, which itself results in numerous consequences such as compromising the patients’ safety.