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Nurses' Perceptions of Pediatric Intensive Care Unit Environment and Work Experience After Transition to
Sapna R Kudchadkar1, M Claire Beers2, Judith A Ascenzi2
1Sapna R. Kudchadkar is an assistant professor, Department of Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine and Pediatrics, and Naresh M. Punjabi is a professor, Department of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland. M. Claire Beers is nurse manager of the pediatric intensive care unit and Judith A. Ascenzi is a clinical nurse specialist, Johns Hopkins Charlotte R. Bloomberg Children's Center, Baltimore, Maryland. Ebaa Jastaniah is a resident physician, Department of Pediatrics, Tufts Baystate Medical Center, Boston, Massachusetts. skudcha1@jhmi.edu.
Background:
The architectural design of the pediatric intensive care unit may play a major role in optimizing the environment to promote patients' sleep while improving stress levels and the work experience of critical care nurses.
Objectives:
To examine changes in nurses' perceptions of the environment of a pediatric critical care unit for promotion of patients' sleep and the nurses' work experience after a transition from multipatient rooms to single-patient rooms.
Methods:
A cross-sectional survey of nurses was conducted before and after the move to a new hospital building in which all rooms in the pediatric critical care unit were single-patient rooms.
Results:
Nurses reported that compared with multipatient rooms, single-patient private rooms were more conducive to patients sleeping well at night and promoted a more normal sleep-wake cycle (P < .001). Monitors/alarms and staff conversations were the biggest factors that adversely influenced the environment for sleep promotion in both settings. Nurses were less annoyed by noise in single-patient rooms (33%) than in multipatient rooms (79%; P < .001) and reported improved exposure to sunlight.
Conclusions:
Use of single-patient rooms rather than multipatient rooms improved nurses' perceptions of the pediatric intensive care unit environment for promoting patients' sleep and the nurses' own work experience.
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