To think night staff could be a bit quieter

[Mammyloveswine]

I'm currently in hospital and am really very poorly... not helping is the complete lack of sleep due to how fucking noisy it is on a night!

I get nurses need to take obs etc through the night which is disruptive but omg they come bounding in, loudly asking my date of birth yet again and taking my blood pressure, faffing with thermometers etc!

New patient has just been brought in, the porters banged the bloody doors open, loudly chatting away whilst wheeling the bed in... nurse now in with patient and they are loudly laughing about some joke the patient made about how she got her injury.

5am the other morning the night staff all stood right outside our ward having a full briefing in loud daytime voices.. there's no whispering, no attempt at all to be quiet!!

I had to actually ask the nurse the otter night at 10:30pm if they were going to dim the bright fluorescent lights.. she laughed and said "eeeh I forget it's nighttime!".

This is a semi lighthearted rant because I am knackered and poorly and I have had wonderful care since being in.. but omg please just let me sleep a bit overnight!!

My last hospital stay my bed was next to the toilet. Old lady in bed opposite kept getting up in the night and leaving the toilet door open and fan going. Then they wanted a blood test.....at 2 am!!!! I told them to come back at a more reasonable hour!!!!!! Hospitals are not the best place for any sleep I'm afraid x hope you feel better soon x

Not enough nurses to take patients outside, and the windows only open a small amount due to patients lobbing themselves out of them( 2 in my career) I wish I could’ve just shut the doors at 10pm and had no admissions, no emergencies and could have ignored all patients until 8am and just hoped that I didn’t find anyone dead. Cheers!

They didn’t want a blood test for the fun of it. It might have been one of the tests that have to be at precise time from the last one but never mind you do you!

Private hospitals do elective surgery, don’t have emergency admissions, don’t have elderly confused patients, they don’t have critically unwell people and you have to fit a strict criteria to have your op there, so no one who has co morbidities, like uncontrolled diabetes, chronic lung disease… they are very fussy, they want the money from the NHS for a patient that will be in and out with no problems. So that’s why it’s different from the NHS and is quieter because there is generally no problems. The staff are trained the same with a lot of nurses that (old school were trained in the NHS) worked previously for the NHS. Of course if you become really unwell, don’t worry because they will phone an ambulance and you will be shipped back to the NHS pretty sharp! Have worked in both and would much prefer being in the NHS IF I WAS VERY ILL. !

I had this the last time I stayed overnight in hospital. My ward was beside the nurse station and they made no attempt to talk quietly, and I could hear them laughing. I hardly got any sleep. So inconsiderate, I was lucky I was only in one night.

2am though???? What blood test is that time specific??? Hmmm

I had bloods taken at 3am once as my heart rate was ridiculously high. Tbh I was more concerned about how ill I was and why than being woken up.

@shellyleppard unfortunately there are several reasons bloods need to be drawn at very inconvenient times. Just off the top of my head:

1. repeat troponin levels. If a patient had experienced chest pains or sudden arrhythmias during the day time, bloods will have been taken as part of the chest pain/arrhythmia pathway. Then several hour later, normally 8 or 12 hours, bloods are repeated to monitor the troponin levels and ensure they aren’t rising. If troponin is present in the blood stream the muscles of the heart are damaged and can be extreamly serious even if the patient feels ‘well’ at the time.
2. timed medications. Peak and trough levels, or just serum levels, need to be taken for some drugs to ensure they levels remain in a therapeutic range. Depending on the time to medications are prescribed the bloods may need to be drawn at very awkward times. If bloods are not taken at the correct time it will delay the next dose of medications which can have serious implications for the unwell patient.
3. if a patients night time observations are deranged. Or if the patient spikes a temperature. Again the patient may feel well but by drawing blood at the first sign of deterioration the results can be reviewed by the doctor and antibiotics/treatment can be rapidly administered before serious complications such as Sepsis develop.
4. Severe or worsening AKI which can be life threatening May require twice daily bloods and the doctor may have requested them at horrible times. (8am and 8pm would be the ideal for nurses and patients but I have know 4am and 4pm as it’s more convenient for doctors to review the bloods when they start their ward round at 8am then having to make two trips to the ward to review the results that weren't back yet).

All of the above situations could be life threatening if the correct protocol wasn’t followed. However I would be shocked if someone was just having ‘routine’ bloods done in the middle of the night and would definitely be questioning that practice.

As a result of reading this, I've researched the cost of private health insurance. I'd rather go without a lot of things than be subjected to the dreadful lack of attention and basic kindness which is essential when you're ill. I endured it 4 years ago when I was admitted to the local NHS hospital with a broken hip. They failed to fix it, bodged a remedy and I ended up paying £14,000 for a private operation which should have been done free under the lifelong NH contributions I've paid. The constant noise at night was totally unacceptable and impossible to ignore together with an elderly man nearby (probably suffering from dementia( who screamed with pleasure as he masturbated throughout the night. How the very young nurses dealt with him I really don't know.

It felt like a modern day experience of Bedlam. To be told that our NHS is still the envy of the world is such a blatant lie that I will pay my last penny to avoid it.

We always tried to keep the noise down on the wards when I worked on them. Most of the nightime noise came from sundowning patients/detoxing patients/those with delirium and one memorable evening someone trying to break through the fire doors from the ward next door using a fire extinguisher bets were taken on how long they would hold up ! . We quite often had to move a patient for their own safety, because a sleep deprived patient was threatening to harm them, so they ended up in their bed in the corridor next to the nurses station.
Add to this the call bells, the resus bell being accidentally being pulled in the toilets and the phone ringing through the night, us tiptoing around and whispering really had very little impact !

I had just had thyroid removal surgery so I would assume the blood test was for that???

And returning to the real world? There aren't the resources for them to pander to oversensitive people. Go private, problem solved.

Troponin

I had my ankle fused a few years ago, almost went septic. I was in a bad way and the night staff were the icing on the cake. I did not sleep at all as they were so noisy in and out, having a chat here and there. Trying to start conversation with me whilst taking my observations in the middle of the night?!? Not to mention the constant lights and the beeping. I was highly medicated on morphine and fentanyl and they still managed to wake me up numerous times. There’s no chance of sleeping in hospitals.

Those damn night staff diligently monitoring you regularly over night trying to keep you alive or stopping further deterioration.
I take it you would have preferred a close the door and just hope she is better in the morning approach.

No one here - or not very many - is criticising hard working and often put upon and over worked ( or even occasionally insensitive staff) doing their jobs and necessary noise unavoidable on a ward or medically necessary interventions. It is the unprofessional uncaring chatterers not talking about work related matters that are being criticised. The attitude shown by the suggestion that patients who have the temerity to expect some regard to be paid to their welfare should 'go private' is one reason why the NHS is doomed and we'll hopefully move to a model closer to the rest of Europe which is more patient focussed.

I've had blood tests (and xray, ct scans and ECGs done in the middle of the night.

Because you know what? If your dying, they're not really gonna say "Ye lassie, let's wait til moaning Martha wakes up, at 7am". I'm so sorry my near death experience may have disturbed someone's beauty sleep! FFS, I some people really don't know how to think do they???

Agree patients need urgent tests and monitoring often which involves staff communicating to deaf patients , noisy machinery and trolleys.If they want a hotel go to the Hilton.

They cannot administer medications in the dark but need light strangely enough.
.

Wow. The attitude of some of the posters on here is quite revealing I think.

Calling it “beauty sleep” and “a night in the Hilton” as though an ill patient who needs sleep to recover is somehow entitled and asking for luxuries… .

How patient-centred is that?

And not only is this attitude pretty blasé, it’s actually medically unsound if you are properly aware of the restorative properties of sleep.

Every reasonable person knows that obs and meds and procedures need to be attended to in the night but it doesn’t have to be all lights blazing and chatting on the one hand or total silence the next. Other European hospitals manage a perfectly happy medium.

" I am old enough to remember when the nurse used to go round with her trolley and ask if you needed anything to help you sleep and everyone used to get a lovely sleeping pill and a good night's rest!"

Also the nurses used a torch when they came in to do obs at night 😂

I had the nurses use a little pen light when they needed to do something to my drip.

I'm sorry to hear so many dispiriting stories. Perhaps patients facing overnights should be advised to bring ear plugs and eye masks. But I agree that patients' relatives and patients themselves sometimes also contribute - and they should be told not to be noisy, limits on numbers on the wards, tv/radio off by xpm unless earphones, only emergency calls. I'm surprised by the PP who mentioned separate intensive care rooms in the US - which possibly explains the high cost of medical care since you'd need more staff and more kit.

The answer isn’t as simple as ‘go private’ or to call people precious or moaning if they complain.

It’s not tests or lights being turned on during the night that bothered me during overnight hospital stays. It’s conversations and laughing about their personal lives so loud that everyone could hear every word. Nurses (and it does seem to be nurses, rather than doctors, in my experience) should be professional enough so that this doesn’t happen. Keep your voices down when you’re talking about yourselves!

Our 12 year old daughter was in a 6 bed ward with adults, one male walking around naked and shouting all day and all night and two old ladies calling out all night. We took her out against medical advise as soon as she'd had her op