If you’ve ever been to the hospital, then you’ve probably noticed that it’s not an ideal place to get a good night’s rest.
In fact, according to this Dutch study, you sleep 83 minutes less in hospital than you do at home!
It’s not difficult to see the reason why.
The mattress and the pillow isn’t your own. For sure, you can bring your pillow and blanket, but the entire bed?
Not that easy.
What if the beds in a hospital would be as comfortable as your bed at home? Wouldn’t you always want to get sick?
Well, probably not unless you’re a huge hospital food fan.
When we think of staying in a hospital for a couple of days, all we can imagine is the horror of sleeping in the hard, uncomfortable, and unwanted bed.
What most patients want is getting some decent rest when they are in a hospital recovering.
Lots of various factors such as noise from machines and people make hospitals difficult places to sleep.
However, hospital beds are one of the main reasons for decreased sleep quality. They’re clunky and made from either metal or plastic. Their standard size is of a twin bed size, and some of them have wheels for mobility.
Everyone should sleep in the most comfortable bed possible. If you don’t know how to achieve that, then here are eight easy ways to make the hospital or even a nursing home bed more comfortable.
Let’s start with easy things you can do.
One of the easiest and most obvious ways to make the bed feel almost like home is to bring your pillow and blanket.
Keep in mind hygiene, though. The pillows and blankets should be cleaned and changed adequately to disinfect them and to make the hospital bed more comfortable.
The mattress is the first thing you land on in a bed. Unfortunately, at a hospital, mattresses sometimes feel like you’re sleeping on a block of concrete.
This is where the mattress pad helps as it can soften the mattress.
A mattress topper is a thin or thick material used to cover the mattress for more support. It helps to improve blood circulation in the body, can relieve pressure points, and reduce back pain, thus enhancing your sleep.
You can get it soft or firm, and they come in different materials with latex and memory foam being the most popular ones.
Invest in an excellent quality mattress topper or pad to make sure your hospital bed provides the best comfort.
If you have visitors staying overnight on the sofa couch, you can also take advantage of the mattress pad and make the couch more comfortable.
Here’s a quick guide on how to choose the best possible mattress pad for you or your loved one.
For any fall prevention, bed rails are essential. The bed rail pads or bumper pads enable the patient to help pull themselves to get in or out of bed, and it also helps the patients from falling out of bed.
But using bed bumper pads made of hard metal and plastic exterior can cause damage leading to uneasy, unclear, or agitation in a patient.
The right kind of bed rail pads is highly essential. There is a difference in the design of the bed rail pads though its functions are the same. While choosing bed rail pads, here are a few things to remember.
Overbed trays or hospital bed tables, as they’re often called, are a convenient way to get some work done from the comfort of your bed.
The height of the tabletop can also be adjusted to provide space for reading, computer work, and dining.
Hospitals, rehabilitation centers, home and long term facilities with the regular, hospital, and low beds use overbed tables or trays.
If there is none available at your local facility, then you can easily get one from Amazon.
You can get similar to one pictured above or one with wheels on the floor that is even more comfortable as it’s much easier to move around.
A hospital bed caddy is a storage organizer that can be removed and attached and hangs on the upper surface of a bed rail in the hospital.
It’s basically a bag on the bed rail for you to store a variety of personal items and have them within arms reach.
Weather too hot and you’re sweating hard? Well, hopefully, you have air conditioning in your room for a start.
But if you need a little bit of extra cooling then consider getting a simple a cooling fan.
Alternatively, grab an extra blanket if you’re feeling chilly.
We touched a bit on the noise levels earlier in this article. You know, the hospital being open 24/7, noise in the hallway, nurses coming and going, etc.
Well, you can easily dial it down by closing your door. Or, you can mute the noise by getting a pair of earplugs. Even better, take your headphones with you so you can listen to some tunes and ignore everything around you.
Bowel and urinary incontinence faced by many people result in sleep disorders and psychological factors. These waterproof mattress protectors ensure comfort, the bed stays dry and a night of good sleep.
The bed pads positioned on top of the mattress or underneath. You can easily find medical waterproof mattress protectors online.
It dramatically helps patients in hospitals diagnosed with incontinence. Instead of changing the mattress too many times and getting it wet, the incontinence bed pads come in handy.
In short, yes. Few nurses find it inappropriate and unacceptable but most don’t really care as long you’re comfortable and the patient’s condition isn’t serious.
You can sneak in the same bed with a partner as long as you act appropriately.
There’s also a couch or chair in the room that you can use.
We covered how to upgrade your bed for extra comfort and you can use some of these tricks for the couch as well. You can get a mattress pad to soften it or to cover the gaps if the couch has any.
Take some extra pillows with you, it’s still not going to be great but should provide some sort of comfort at least.
The same applies here. Bring extra pillows, blankets, and possibly mattress topper, although it’s probably too big for the chair.
In that case, it’s probably just easier to use it on the floor, and to be fair you would probably get better sleep rather than curling up in an old school chair.
And that’s it!
As you see, getting your own pillow and investing in a mattress topper may dramatically improve the quality of your hospital stay.
Follow these tips, and hopefully, you will get the comfort you or your loved one deserve.