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Post‐operative patients' views of sleep, pain and recovery
Author(s) -
CLOSS S. JOSÉ
Publication year - 1992
Publication title -
journal of clinical nursing
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.94
H-Index - 102
eISSN - 1365-2702
pISSN - 0962-1067
DOI - 10.1111/j.1365-2702.1992.tb00070.x
Subject(s) - sleep (system call) , medicine , abdominal pain , physical therapy , pain catastrophizing , anesthesia , chronic pain , surgery , computer science , operating system
Summary• One‐hundred patients who had undergone abdominal surgery were interviewed about their experiences of pain and sleep. • Pain was the most common cause of disturbed sleep and half of the patients felt that pain was worse during the night. • More than one‐third of the sample felt that tiredness affected post‐operative pain, for the most part making it worse. • One‐third felt that sleep reduced pain intensity, three‐quarters felt that sleep helped them to cope with their pain and almost all believed that sleep enhanced recovery from surgery. • For the post‐operative patient, therefore, pain and sleep cannot be considered separately. • Methods for the effective assessment and control of pain at night (leading to associated improvements in sleep) require development by nurse researchers and practitioners.