Impact of nurse-assisted patient turning at different sleep stages on the quality of subsequent sleep.

Background: Nursing care performed during sleep, including nurse-assisted patient turning, is one of the factors that deteriorates sleep quality but is necessary for pressure ulcer prevention. Thus, it is important to determine when nurseassisted patient turning has the least impact on sleep quality.

Aim: The aim of this study was to clarify the impact of nurseassisted patient turning at different sleep stages and to determine the optimal timing of this aspect during sleep.

Methods: The experiment, which consisted of healthy men in their 20s and 30s, was performed over four successive nights per subject. The first night was dedicated to environment adaptation, and the 2nd to the 4th nights were randomly assigned for shallow sleep intervention, deep sleep intervention, and non-intervention. On the intervention day, nurse-assisted patient turning was conducted twice. Overnight sleep conditions were measured by polysomnography (PSG). The PSG waveform transmitted to a tablet was analyzed in real time to determine the stage of sleep. The patient was turned when he entered the planned stage of sleep.

Results: The study analyzed fourteen (14) subjects. Shallow sleep time, deep sleep time, and sleep resumption time after nurse-assisted patient turning were compared among the three groups of non-intervention day, shallow sleep intervention day and deep sleep intervention day. There was no significant difference in the shallow and deep sleep time among the three groups. However, sleep resumption time after nurse-assisted patient turning was significantly shorter on the deep sleep intervention day than on the shallow sleep intervention day (p = textbf 0.033).

Conclusions: This study has novelty in examining the impact of nurse-assisted patient turning performed at different sleep stages on subsequent sleep using objective indicators. The study suggested that a deep sleep state is the optimal timing of nurseassisted patient turning due to the short time to sleep resumption.