Promoting sleep in the adult surgical intensive care unit patients to prevent delirium.

Ensuring adequate sleep for hospitalized patients is important for reducing stress, improving healing, and decreasing episodes of delirium. The purpose of this project was to implement a Sleep Program for stable patients in the surgical intensive care unit, thereby changing sleep management practices and ensuring quality of care using an evidence-based practice approach. Improving patient satisfaction with sleep by 28 percentage points may be attributed to a standardized process of providing a healing environment for patients to sleep.