Sleep quality among nurses in a tertiary hospital in North-West Nigeria

Sleep is a necessity; it is nourishing, refreshing and healing. The nursing profession is associated with busy and difficult work schedules, especially the running of shifts which has been associated with cardiovascular and metabolic complications. There is a dearth of local data on sleep disorders, especially among nurses. In this study, we evaluated the quality of sleep and the tendency of daytime sleepiness among nurses.

This study was cross-sectional in nature involving 100 nurses working with Federal Medical Centre Birnin Kebbi, Kebbi State; the study was carried out between October 2016 and February 2017. The Pittsburg Sleep Quality Index was used to determine poor sleepers; while the Epworth Sleepiness Scale (ESS) was adopted to determine the presence of tendency of daytime sleepiness; 0-7 was considered normal, 8-9 represented average tendency of daytime sleepiness, 10-15 represented excessive daytime sleepiness, while 16-24 represented daytime sleepiness requiring medical intervention. P < 0.05 was set as statistically significant.

There were 23 (23%) males and 77 (77%) females, with a male-to-female ratio of 0.3:1. The age range was 18-50 years, with a mean age of 31.4 ± 8.6 years. The ESS score ranged from 0.0-17.0, with a mean score of 7.3 ± 3.5; while the Pittsburg score ranged between 1 and 15, with a mean score of 5.7 ± 2.7, and 61% of the nurses had a poor sleep quality. There was unlikely tendency of excessive sleepiness across all the age groups, though this was not statistically significant (χ2 = 7.258, P = 0.283), and poor sleep quality was most prevalent among the 25-40-year-old group but this observation was also not statistically significant (χ2 = 2.259, df = 2, P = 0.334).

Poor sleep quality is a problem among nurses, though less tendency to daytime sleepiness was observed in this report.