Children lose hour of sleep in noisy hospital wards

A Southampton Children’s Hospital study has found that most children and their parents lose more than an hour’s sleep during hospital admissions, with noise levels a major cause of disruption.

Led by Dr Catherine Hill at Southampton Children’s Hospital, the study revealed that the sound on medical wards exceeded the World Health Organization-recommended 30 decibel maximum. The research argues that most hospitals were ‘notoriously poor’ sleep environments which could ‘impact outcomes’.

Published online by the journal Archives of Disease in Childhood, Hill’s study compared the length and quality of sleep experienced by 46 children with an average age of nine and 16 of their mothers on general children’s wards and in their bedrooms at home. The average sound level recorded on hospital wards was 48.24 decibels, reaching 50.35 decibels for beds in open bays, while the noise levels recorded in the children’s bedrooms averaged 34.7 decibels.

Furthermore, the children in the study slept on average for 63 fewer minutes a night while their mothers got just under 73 fewer minutes.

Hill said: “Previous research has indicated that children’s cancer and intensive care wards are noisy at night, but this is the first time we have established the same situation on general medical wards. When children lose sleep in hospital they have a lower pain threshold, are more emotional and may have lowered immune defences, so this is an issue we need to address.”

A University of Southampton-led Sleep for Health in Hospital programme, which is set to be rolled-out nationwide, seeks to improve the sleep environment for young patients and their parents by seeing lights dimmed at 8pm and a flag raised on each ward to remind everyone about bedtime, the end of visiting hours for the day and the need to switch off electronic entertainment or use headphones.