Assessing Sleep Health: And Other Recommended Reading from AJN’s July Issue

The July issue of AJN is now live.

This month’s CE article, “Assessing and Promoting Sleep Health: A Brief Guide for Nurses,” outlines foundational information on sleep; general sleep health assessment; symptoms, risk factors, and screening measures related to common sleep disorders; and practical strategies nurses can use to promote healthy sleep.

“It’s important that RNs have effective ways to access and use integrative health programs and resources that are available to them. But this can be especially difficult for nurses who work at night,” write Withall and colleagues in “An Integrative Health Educational Intervention for RNs Working at Night: A Pilot Study.” This study aimed to assess whether an asynchronous integrative health educational intervention, tailored for night-shift nurses, was useful to them. (Open access)

Our July AJN Reports, Maternal Health: ‘A Crisis Within a Crisis,’” explores how recent federal funding cuts are threatening efforts to improve care and disparities.

In “Utilization of Pressure Injury Prevention Interventions in Acute Care Hospitals,” the authors examine the relationship between nurses’ adherence to pressure injury prevention practices and hospital-acquired pressure injury development. (Open access)

As noted by Otis and colleagues in this month’s Program Evaluation, “The trauma that nurses experience when […]

2025-06-26T11:21:16-04:00June 26th, 2025|Nursing|0 Comments

What’s Enough? Why It’s Essential for Nurses to Assess Adolescent Sleep

By Sylvia Foley, AJN senior editor

Illustration © Anne Horst / www.i2iart.com

In her poem “Sleep in the Mohave Desert,” Sylvia Plath wrote about not sleeping, feeling comfortless, tormented by the “heat-cracked crickets . . . [that] fiddle the short night away” in “the blue hour before sunup.” Though Plath was writing as an adult, sleeplessness and other sleep difficulties have troubled humans of all ages for centuries. Until recently, we could only guess at the health consequences. Now there is mounting evidence that inadequate or insufficient sleep has many adverse effects. Adolescents appear to be particularly vulnerable—and it’s not simply because they’re rebelling against bedtime. In this month’s CE, “Assessing Sleep in Adolescents Through a Better Understanding of Sleep Physiology,” authors Nancy George and Jean Davis offer an in-depth look.

Overview: Adolescents need about nine hours of sleep per night, yet most teens get far less. Inadequate sleep has consequences not only for academic performance but also for mental and physical health; it has been linked to lowered resilience and an increased risk of cardiovascular and metabolic diseases. It’s imperative that assessment of sleep become a routine part of adolescent health care. An understanding of sleep physiology is essential to helping nurses better assess and manage sleep deprivation in this population. Sleep assessment involves evaluating the three main aspects of sleep: amount, quality, and architecture. The authors provide an overview of sleep physiology, describe sleep changes that occur during adolescence, […]

2017-07-27T14:51:02-04:00June 7th, 2013|Nursing|1 Comment
Go to Top