BackgroundSleep quality in hospitalized Canadian General Internal Medicine patients is not well characterized. Our goals were to characterize hospital sleep quality in this population and identify potentially modifiable barriers to good sleep.MethodsGIM inpatients at a quaternary centre in Edmonton, Canada completed a survey, including the Verran-Snyder Halpern (VSH) questionnaire, to characterize the previous night’s sleep within 48 hours prior to discharge. A chart review was also completed to assess comorbidities, discharge diagnoses, and pharmaceutical sleep aid use.ResultsPatients reported significantly worse nighttime sleep duration in hospital compared with home (mean 5.5 versus 7.0 hours per night, p < 0.0001). Sleep quality was poor, as measured by the VSH disturbance (mean 371), effectiveness (190), and supplementation (115) subscales. Variables independently associated with poorer sleep duration in multivariable regression include prior diagnosis of sleep disorder and multi-patient occupancy rooms. Age, sex, admitting diagnosis, length of stay, frequency of vital checks, and use of sleep pharmaceuticals during the index hospitalization were not associated with sleep duration. The most frequently reported reasons for poor sleep included noise (59%), nursing interruptions (30%), uncomfortable beds (18%), bright lights (16%), unfamiliar surroundings (14%), and pain (9%).ConclusionsSleep quality for GIM inpatients is significantly worse in hospital than at home. There is a need to test non-pharmacologic interventions to address the most frequently identified factors causing poor sleep hygiene for GIM inpatients.

An ICD-10 I50.x diagnosis in the ED is highly predictive of AHF compared with chart-level adjudication using a validated score. Thus, the use of these codes in ED administrative databases could identify AHF for clinical and epidemiological studies.

In a recent quality assurance project we learned that nearly half of the handovers we examined were characterized as unsatisfactory by our residents, who provided examples in which their anxiety had been piqued and patient care had been affected. These reports substantiated a growing body of literature on the relationship between the quality of handover and the quality of patient care, so we sought to improve the quality and consistency of the in-hosptial handovers undertaken by our internal medicine residents. Senior residents attended morning report for three consecutive month long blocks and evaluated the quality of the handovers using an observational protocol comprised of 16 aspects of effective handover.During the first block, the resident observed a median of eight of the 16 practices occurring across the 46 handovers, and a large amount of variability. At the beginning of the subsequent block we presented a concise introduction to a structured handover procedure (SBARR). The median quality of the subsequent 33 handovers rose to 11, and the variability decreased considerably. In the next block we refined the SBARR orientation to focus on the errors observed in the previous blocks, and the improvement in the quality and variability was sustained. The minor change, which requires few resources to sustain, had a favourable impact on the quality of our residents' in-hospital handovers.