"Sleeping in Ward 2"

My child has been admitted to Ward 2 of the Children’s Hospital in Sheffield four times in the past year. The new ward is fabulous and very welcoming to children. The staff are extremely hard working but still manage to remain cheerful and helpful. However, it is impossible to get any sleep.

I understand there is a medical need to wake up patients for observations and an unavoidable amount of noise created by buzzers etc, but the noise on this ward goes well beyond that. The ward has an open plan nurses’ station on the corridor. The ward has private rooms and two mini bays of four beds, we’ve stayed in various beds, the only ones that are at all quiet are the ones further away from the nurses’s station. In the mini bays and the rooms near the station you can hear everything, not just murmurs but entire conversations.

I heard conversations I didn’t want to hear and should not have heard. An argument between three nurses about some texts, a discussion of how awful a patient’s parent was and, worse of all, a lot of discussions of medical details of patients. I heard a telephone conversation arranging palliative care for a patient identified by name and bed number. I don’t think I should have heard any of that.

The general noise in the nurses’s station goes on till very late. Nurses work very hard and have the right to socialize and relax but talking loudly at 11:30pm in a corridor makes it impossible for patients to sleep. My child burst into tears because she couldn’t sleep and I can feel for her - I was woken up four times in one hour by people outside our room.

The new wing still has ‘teething’ problems a year since we first visited it. The lights come on all by themselves all the time, so after an awful night you get woken up at 5:45am when all the lights suddenly come on. The lights were a problem in all the beds we stayed at and during all the visits. Some of the windows open all by themselves and sometimes refuse to close even from the nurses’s main control board.

My child talks about the lack of sleep in the hospital and it has become an issue she worries and talks about before her next visit. It creates more tension and unhappiness at a time which is difficult enough. Sleep is essential to recovery and well being of children, maybe something can be done to make things easier for patients in ward 2? Thank you.