Objective:

The study aims to investigate the quality of sleep and the factors contributing to sleep disruption in surgical patients.

Material and Methods:

The data were collected by a form including personal and demographic information, and “a form of factors affecting sleep pattern (FFASP)”. FFASP is a likert type scale containing 24 questions. In FFASP, questions about sleep problems were administered with 5-point response categories: 1=it does not affect at all, 2=It does not affect, 3=I am indecisive, 4=It does affect, 5=It affects a lot. The highest score was 120 and the lowest score was 24 in the scale. Results are given as percentage, mean and standard deviation. Data were analyzed using Mann-Whitney U test and Kruskal Wallis variant analysis.

Results:

Totally 134 patients were included in the study. The mean age of the patients was 49.47±17.85. The mean FFASP score of the patients was 57.35±13.24. Patients experienced high levels of postoperative pain had a higher frequency of significant postoperative sleeping problems. Other factors that have the most negative effects to sleep quality were the airlessness of the room, medical devices attached to the body, crowdedness of the hospital room and noise. Regarding the patients’ descriptive characteristics and FFASP mean scores, it was observed that gender, marital status, level of education, and history of chronic illness did not affect FFASP mean scores and that there was no statistically significant difference (p>0.05). There was a statistically significant difference (p<0.05) between the mean FFASP score of the patients who had been previously hospitalized and the patients who had their first hospitalization.

Conclusion:

The fact that surgical inpatients have levels of sleep quality below average shows that the factors affecting sleep quality should be detected clearly and the necessary arrangements should be conducted. In the light of our results, we suggest that providing patients’ pain control and physical comfort, reducing noise, and increasing the awareness of health professionals regarding this problem would be helpful in increasing the sleep quality of patients.

Keywords: Surgery, patient, sleep disorders