After HCAHPS data identified an opportunity for the hospital to improve patients’ experience of restfulness, BJC HealthCare’s innovation lab led nurses through two workshops to brainstorm sleep-improving interventions. Nine interventions were selected for testing and grouped into bundles, which the Barnes-Jewish Hospital piloted in two-week sprints between May 1, 2021 and Dec. 31, 2022.
Interventions included clustering care activities at night to reduce unnecessary interruptions, giving nurses clip-on flashlights to wear instead of turning on overhead lights and providing patients with white noise machines.
Before the quality improvement study, 51% of patients said their hospital ward was “always” quiet at night. This figure jumped to 86% after the interventions. Excessive noise events fell from 0.65 per 100 patient-nights to zero during the study period. Patients’ sleep opportunity — the amount of time available to sleep — also increased from 4.94 hours per night to 5.10.
“Nurses rated these interventions as highly satisfactory, and informal evidence of adoption was strong,” researchers wrote. “These results demonstrate how [human-centered design] methods can generate practical and effective strategies for improving an important patient-related outcome and a core element of patient experience.”
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