Environmental Comfort in Promoting Sleep in Critically Ill Patients

Introduction It is important to understand the concept of comfort as a whole to build an assistance intervention plan that meets the person's needs. Therefore, it is necessary to monitor and assess the person's sleep by considering the surrounding environment, to provide a comfortable environment that is quiet and provides privacy, especially in contexts of difficult management of environmental factors in the approach to the person in critical condition. Objectives The aims of this study were to map the nursing interventions that promote sleep-promoting environmental comfort in critically ill people and identify the instruments to assess sleep in critically ill people. Methods This is a scoping review based on the methodological strategy of the Joanna Briggs Institute for Scoping Reviews. The search was conducted on February 17 and 18, 2022, in the databases CINAHL, Cochrane Library Plus, PubMed, JBI Evidence Synthesis, SciELO, DANS Easy Archive, RCAAP, and DART-Europe using the Boolean phrase search strategy: “Hospital Emergency Service” OR “Critical Care” AND “Sleep” NOT “Children” AND Nurs*. We included all studies, conducted in any contextual setting, in Portuguese, English, or Spanish, on adult patients with acute and/or critical illness in intensive care and/or emergency units, which addressed nursing interventions that contribute to environmental comfort and promote sleep. Studies on pregnant or puerperal women, persons with psychiatric disorders, and those at the end of life or in palliative care were excluded. Results Twenty-one articles were included in this scoping review. Three categories of nursing interventions emerged: person centered (14 interventions), environment centered (37 interventions), and nurse role centered (45 interventions). Three categories of instruments for sleep assessment emerged, in particular: quality of sleep (12 instruments), environmental effects on a night's sleep (2 instruments), and influence on sleep practices in the intensive care unit (1 instrument). Discussion The use of instruments to monitor comfort and sleep allows for an accurate assessment of the impact of nurses' intervention focusing on sleep-promoting interventions aimed at comfort, for an improvement of sleep in critically ill patients. Conclusion The interpretation of the content makes it clear that how critically ill patients in different contexts experience the environmental context positively or negatively conditions their comfort. In this sense, it is essential to reflect on these measures as a team so that everyone can apply them.