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!!

@wishihadagoodone Not on MN are nurses put on a pedestal lol.

I think both YANBU for all the reasons mentioned - sleep is so important - but also YABU because it's bloody hard for night staff to maintain a sleep-conducive level of quiet for hours on end when they're wide awake and having to do their jobs. If someone asked you to speak in a low voice and move around quietly during your whole shift at work, you would find it very taxing.

So I think it's one of those situations that really sucks but we have to, well, suck it up. An eye mask and ear plugs would be a great solution.

Ah you are not unreasonable to expect night shift nurses to make attempts to be quiet during nights. While there seams to be so many bad experiences on here, as a nurse I know I do all I can at nights to stay quiet but sometimes it’s literally impossible. I work on an acute post op surgical ward and it is loud at all hours unfortunately.
As an example me and my night shift colleagues don’t really have chance to have ‘chats’ as there is a maximum of only 2 nurses on shift. So if we are talking, it’s is about work and what to do about patients we are worried about or co-ordinating care for a patient who requires 2 or 3 nurses at a time (even though we don’t have 3).
we have all bought our own neck torches so we can keep lights low during overnight observations and to actually check patients are breathing without turning all the lights on (nhs won’t provide these despite making a big difference in regards to disturbing patients).
we get admissions from emergency theatres day and night, and in the immediate post op period patients need to be monitored at least every 30 mins. That’s a full set of observations and input/output charting and line management. That wether your surgery was at 2pm or 2am, no exceptions. This would be much easier and efficient if the hospital provided us with equipment that wasn’t on its last legs at least 10 years old. The amount of faffing and broken wheels we deal with is rediculous.
we can’t stop machines bleeping, they are bleeping so call the nurses attention. All you can do is try to respond as quickly as possible. Again this is difficult if both nurses are busy assisting another patient. we can’t stop other patients disturbing you by messing with the machine so they can nip out.
we can’t turn the lights out til we have safely finished medication rounds. On a good night this is 10pm (ish) on a bad night it can be close to midnight, it depends how unwell patients are and how often the medication round is interrupted. We could get this done a lot quicker if we had more hands on the ward but alas the higher up decided 2 is a safe number for overnight.
We can’t give sleeping pills out like sweets. They have to be reviewed and prescribed by a doctor as sleeping pills (like zoplicone) can be very dangerous for acutely unwell patients.

it’s so hard. I feel for our patients who end up need lengthy stays. We don’t provide eye masks and rarely have ear plugs in stock. The hospital won’t provide them. Rest assured while there seam to be so many complaints, most nurses would never laugh at a patient for complaining or being in pain and needing help. It’s awful to read but some of us do really care and try to keep the noise down over night. It’s an impossible task though 😔. I detest the night shift as they are always understaffed and hectic. Nothing you do is ever good enough and management are no where to be seen to see what staff and patients have to suffer through.

This is so frustrating because it’s so easily fixable. It’s not something that requires funding or an additional burden placed on staff, it just requires a change in the hospital culture/mentality of staff to run the wards as quietly as possible to allow patients to rest. We all know that rest is imperative to recovery.

Some people just don't seem capable of being quiet either

I was at the vets having my cat PTS. They put a light/candle on with a big notice that someone is saying goodbye and to please be quiet
There was a woman with children playing games in the waiting room who wouldn't keep it down even when staff told her to be quiet
Ended up saying goodbye to him with the noise of them screaming and laughing in the background

So as a nurse I can see this from both sides

Yes some of my colleagues are noisy and I have told them to quiet down on many an occasion.

However sometimes noise at night is inevitable - a memory sticks with me of I was giving a toddler CPR whilst their parents were screaming (understandably) at 1am, staff were all rushing around shouting for equipment (obviously) and another parent coming out of their room shouting at us all to shut up as we were disturbing their sleep.

Obviously sometimes we don’t mean to be so loud and this isn’t the case in most scenarios, but people need to be mindful that they are not the only person in the world and sometimes some things are more important than being silent at night.

That’s bad. Annoying when you are about to sleep and someone wakes you up.

i hope you feel a lot better soon 💐

Oh god. I feel your pain. I really hope you are able to get a bit more rest today. It is indeed a form of torture. 😥

A few years back, I was in hospital for quite a large, planned, surgery. I was in for 5 days, and was in a side room. I went home feeling I'd actually had an opportunity to rest up a bit. Unfortunately, 4 days later, I ended up with post-op sepsis, and was wheeched back in for the wound to be re-opened and cleaned, and to be on IV antibiotics.
I'm also allergic to a few antibiotics, so ended up on this overly-complicated titration of IV antibiotics, which I was hooked up to for 18 hours a day. So, 6 hours on, 1 hour off, ad infinitum for 11 days.

Fuck me, if I hadn't been so poorly, I'd have walked. It beeped. Constantly. Like, X much has gone in through the drip - beep; X much is left in the bag - beep; the bag is finished - beep; I've not beeped for about 15 mins - beep. I was driven to distraction by it, and really felt for the three other women in the ward. (Well, not the nasty racist, but that's a whole other story...)

Totally agree - sleep, good food and fresh air - all massively beneficial for good help (and free/cheap) don't exist in hospital. Humans just aren't very bright generally though are they ?

It's a bit of a thing that it's so quiet at night that you hear every little thing. Hospitals suck, i really feel your pain, got f all sleep in hospital myself.

YANBU at all OP. I've experienced the exact same thing. Incredibly inconsiderate and short sighted given how essential rest is to recovery.

I would like to have serious words with whoever invented the bins used in hospital, the slamming of the lid can be heard for miles......

I think its a hit and miss depending on what ward you are on. I was moved to a ward at midnight and all the lights were off bar the nurses lamp, monitor and a little christmas tree. It was pitch black and silent. I actually started to get creeped out as my eyes couldnt adjust to see if there was anyone in the nearby beds!

My Mum was in hospital for a few days after having me in the 70s. One night a nurse woke her up ..to give her a sleeping tablet.

@TinglingTangling

NHS don’t have the resources to take patients on a wonder outside. If your parents were able to be taken outside you could of done it yourself.

And I did, whenever I could. But with two desperately ill parents being at hospitals at different parts of the country, sometimes at the same time, and with young children too, it's wasn't as simple as that. But I am partly talking about simple fresh air coming through windows, not just 'going for a wonder'. I just think that the NHS should be making the most of the free benefit of fresh air and sleep.

It is tough, I’ve been on both sides
as a patient and as a parent (asthmatic kid) they did shut the bay doors at night and we were allowed lights off. Dr did come in lights on sat my child up in his sleep to examine him poor thing had the fright of his life

also as a nurse (paeds) I used to try to be as quiet as I could there were no doors on the bays so we’d sit quietly doing notes and chatting under our breath but some people just don’t have inside voices no matter how much we tell them to be quiet. Frustrating. Obs wise we do them 0-4 hourly dependant on need and if a child is in for asthma, breathing issues a pocket torch is not appropriate for Obs as you need to be able to see the work of breathing, colour of child etc however we had night lights on at all times, curtains weren’t allowed shut which parents hated. Just hard on either side but hopefully the majority try to be quiet etc

Southampton hospital did a study that involved big decibel meters in the wards (like those smiley face speed signs) to try and keep things to a reasonable level. The main issue is some nurses can be quiet, can use a torch, can manoeuvre without banging the bed. Others just don’t. And talking at the nurses station or talking in the ward entrance about work is not the same as the change over chit chat and holiday plans etc. no-one expects silence but there are definitely things staff can do to make it easier to sleep. I have spent around 145 nights in hospital over past 2 years across 3 hospitals, so know what I am talking about sadly.

Hope the antibiotics kick in soon and you start to feel better @Mammyloveswine

I'm a paediatric nurse and if we had a cleft lip and palate list, no one is getting any sleep!

That sounds horrendous. Can you get a friend to deliver ear plugs and eye mask? The party plus are amazing and very comfortable and, although they’re £60 the drowsy eye masks are brilliant.

I can still remember my first ever hospital stay many hears ago when the night nurses thought it would be "funny" to hide the junior doctors pager.

There was much noise and laughter as he tried to find it. In the end he had to get switchboard to page him so he could locate it from the sound.

I moaned to the nurse whe she did my obs and apparently they were "teaching him a lesson" because he shouldn't have left it lying around

This almost drove me to a breakdown. I'd had a really traumatic birth, and looking back, I wasn't ok after the birth, but that's a different story. I was exposed both top and bottom, and the nurses came smashing through the doors with a new patient who had several family members with her. My curtains got caught in the placing of the new patient bed and came open. So here I am for all to see. I asked the nurse if she could close the curtain, please. Glaring at me, she opened them further. When she left, I managed to get up and close them. All the male visitors have a look of shock on their faces at this demonic looking new mum, and I suspect, hoping their partners didn't look like I did after giving birth. I got back into bed, and the nurse deliberately came back and opened the curtains, but all the way. Now I'm exposed all 3 sides. I didn't have the energy to get up again. I felt so ashamed. This was at around 2am too.

I never understand how males are allowed on the maternity wards. I know they're the dads, but so many women in vulnerable positions. The food is another topic too. No wonder few heal in hospital

Bit of a different scenario to my night but point taken.

You just answered your own question. Because they're the Dad's, so it's not hard to understand, you already understand why.