Question

Case Study: Hospital Worker Hygiene Program-What would you Do?

Hospital-based health care practitioners often need to work varied shifts, long days with unanticipated overtime. This often results in working an 8 or 10 hour shift and then also completing an addition 4-6 hours more. This results in hours of work with potentially now down time—and to top it off, you are up on your feet almost 100% of the time. You also are assigned critical tasks that will directly affect your patient’s life. Once you step into a hospital, your environment drastically changes. From here on out, you will fully comprehend the meaning of the phrase, “every second counts.” Often, this has individuals putting their lives and their health as a distant priority. Once consequence of this working in a hospital is sleep deprivation. Staff members are tired.

Imagine you are the Wellness Coordinator of the hospital’s employee wellness program and the CEO of the hospital has just assigned you the task of developing a hospital worker sleep hygiene program. Your boss is very clear that he/she does not work a simple educational hour “lunch and learn” and you ask people to log their sleep. Instead develop a four session program to run once a week for a month.

Write a summary including the

a) Overall program goal

b) How you would recruit individuals

c) 2 SMART Objectives for each of the four sessions

d) a short description of each the 4 programs

Please write four paragraphs.

Answer 1

a) Overall program goal

- To promote and maintain adequate sleep pattern among nurses so that the patient care quality is increased.

b) Recruiting Individuals for four session programme

A full 2 hour program can be conducted for nurses in each shift. Considering three shifts from 7 a.m. to 1:00 p.m, 1 p.m. to 7:00 p.m, 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., the sessions can be conducted as follows_ ( 6 hour shift)

1. The first session of program can be conducted from 10am to 12 noon for the 2nd shift nurses.

2. The second session can be conducted from 2pm to 4pm for 1st shift nurses.

3. The third session can be conducted from 4pm to 6pm for night shift nurses.

The above schedule will give nurses a breathing time to refresh and increased attention span.

4. The fourth session can be conducted on a least busy day of the month, probably a Sunday, so that the nurses who missed the session could attend.

c) SMART objectives

​​​​​​* The nurses are provided an efficient shift schedule so that they get adequate rest and sleep.

* Improved Patient care quality.

d) Description about the session

Instead of conducting four different sessions of same topic, the entire contents can be repeated in four different sessions so that the nursing routine is not affected. So the program includes the following discussions in order to manage sleep deprivation in nurses.

1. Limit disturbances during sleep hours such as mobiles, visitors,noises, bright lights etc.

2. Share your schedule with family members

3. Avoid rotating shifts.

4. Avoid extended work hours unless necessary.

5. Take a short nap before night shifts.

6. Take measures to stay awake and alert at work by using bright lights.

7. Avoid working night shifts in a row.