Background: The night-time sleep of patients hospitalized in intensive care is a very important feature within the health or disease process, as it has a direct repercussion on their adequate recovery.
Aims and objectives: (1) To describe how surgical patients perceive their sleep in the intensive care unit; (2) to compare the subjective perception of patients with the nursing records and analyse these for the degree of agreement.
Design: Descriptive research.
Methods: One hundred and four surgical patients were recruited to the study. Patients completed the Richards-Campbell Sleep Questionnaire, a five-item visual analogue scale, to subjectively measure their perceived level of sleep (range 0-100 mm). The observation of patient sleep by nurses, demographic data, nursing care during the night and use of specific pharmacological treatments were also collected from the nursing records.
Results: The total mean score of sleep on the first post-operative night was 51.42 mm, 28% of patients had a good sleep, 46% a regular sleep and 26% a bad sleep. The sleep profile of these patients has been characterized by the patients having a light sleep, with frequent awakening and generally little difficulty to go back to sleep after the awakenings. The agreement between the nurses' perceptions of patients' sleep and the patients' perception of their sleep was tested by means of one-factor analysis of variance (p < 0.05) with a variation coefficient of 36.88%, which indicates that relative agreement was obtained. From analysing every nurse-patient perception, we obtained 44% of total agreement and 56% of disagreement. When discrepancy was found, the nurse generally overestimated the patients' perception.
Conclusions: Surgical patients' perceptions of their sleep in the ICU suggest that this is inadequate. Nurses' perceptions of patients' sleep partially coincides with the latter's perception, but we have also found that the former frequently overestimate patients' sleep.