You can still do all these things, but just take the beep off the medication scanner.”īecause of the importance of sleep to the healing process, Ball and Brunson are among the nurses nationwide who have been looking at innovative and often just common-sense ways to transform hospitals into more restful environments. We recognize these items are essential to patient safety, but we joke that we wish there was a ‘sleep mode’ on some of the equipment. The sounds from the equipment disturb their rest.

“The actual intervention is often not the reason the patient wakes up. “It is the worst to sneak in a room, try and scan an arm band (beep), open the medication cart (beep), scan the bag (beep), hang the bag (beep), reset volume of pump (beep),” said Brunson, president-elect of the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses (AACN), an organizational affiliate of the American Nurses Association (ANA). Then there are the loud medication scanners. We don’t need a 30-minute warning that an I.V. They are so overly sensitive and ‘smart pumps’ can be too smart. Megan Brunson, MSN, RN, CCRN-CSC, CNL, agrees, adding, “The pumps are often the worst offenders. She points to the beeps of alarms, squeaky wheels of carts, and whirs of air mattresses. “I thought hospitals were always quiet all the time,” said Ball, who after practicing as a nurse for some 27 years, knows that hospitals generally are far from being quiet places. As a child, Pam Ball, BSN, RN, NE-BC, recalls her mother pointing to a sign whenever the family drove past the county hospital that read, “Quiet- Hospital Zone,” and urging the children to lower their voices.

The quiet patient