Clinical Care Practice

70th AHCA/NCAL Convention and Expo

CP-2 - Sleep: An Under-Appreciated Key to Well-Being for Older Adults

Speaker(s)

• 

  Cathy Ciolek, DPT, FAPTA

  President
  Living Well With Dementia, LLC

  Disclosure: American Health Care Association (Both Myself and my Spouse/Partner) : Consultant (Status: Ongoing), Salary (Status: Ongoing), Speaker/Honoraria (Status: Ongoing)

Lack of sleep is an often-overlooked contributor to the challenges many residents living in a care facility face. Staff practices and environmental factors contribute to sleep fragmentation and disruption, which a growing body of evidence is showing can worsen pain, delay physical healing, and contribute to distress that presents as psychological symptoms for people with dementia. Quality measures, such as the number of individuals reporting pain, experiencing falls with injury, and requiring psychotropic medications, may be impacted by these sleep challenges. Simple screening tools and devices can assess sleep quality for individuals, and that data can be used to determine whether systematic changes may be beneficial for residents, staff, and facilities.

Learning Objectives:

• Describe the impact of sleep disruption and how it impacts physical healing, pain and well-being for individuals as well as facility quality measures.
• Identify ways to assess sleep quality for individuals in your facility.
• Implement 2-3 changes in your facility practices and environment to improve residents’ sleep quality.