Sleep hygiene among nurses employed in hospital wards

Introduction:
To maintain a bio-psycho-social balance one should sleep about 7-8 hours per day. When planning sleep, it is important to keep elementary rules of sleep hygiene, among others the time of going to bed, avoiding devices generating blue light before sleep, and not eating food and beverages or taking stimulants before sleep as well as restraining from physical effort before going to bed. Sleep hygiene counts among the psychical and physical health coefficients. These aspects are especially important in the professional group of nurses exposed to the high stress and irregular sleep hours connected with the necessity of working at night. Most nursing staff work in a 12-hour shift system. The aim of the work was the assessment of observing sleep hygiene rules by nurses employed in treatment and conservative wards.

Material and methods:
The research was carried out in a group of 129 nurses employed in treatment and conservative hospital wards. The research method applied was a diagnostic survey, and the applied technique was an individual questionnaire. The research tools were the author’s own questionnaire form and the standardised inventory of sleep hygiene and parasomnia (IHSP).

Results:
The results showed that the greatest satisfaction from sleep was among nurses going to bed and rising at the same time every day, i.e. nurses working in a 7.35-hour system, as declared by 54.2% (n = 13) of respondents. An important sleep hygiene rule is the elimination of use of electronic devices before sleep; however, this rule was not obeyed by 67.4% (n = 87) of the nurses. Nurses needed 4 hours 42 minutes (24.4%) of sleep on average after their night duties. Shift work negatively affected the sleep of 71.3% (n = 92) of enquired nurses, while 14 persons (10.8%) did not notice a negative effect of shiftwork on their sleep.