Evaluating of Sleep Quality in Shift-Work Nurses; Iran

Abstract

Sleep quality directly influences mental and physical acts of human. Shift workers, such as nurses are at extreme risk for poor sleep. In this article we have attempt to evaluate how the beliefs of nurses about their sleep quality were. The paper is a cross sectional study among 370 nurses and correlates to demographics. Totally 151 (41%) men and 219 (59%) women participated. All of them had nursing education degree and had work experience. We found the prevalence of sleep disturbances as high as 86% and total mean score of the Persian version of Pittsburg’s Sleep Questionnaire Index (PSQI-P) calculated 7.13 ± 2.5 in the study. The most common complaint of shift-work nurses was delay in sleeping initiation. We did not find any significant relation between sleep disorders and gender, age, years of nursing and hospital department of service. Although, inadequate sleep quality is a worldwide problem, but the wide difference between subjective findings of nurses and those of the general population is very significant.