"Sleep clinic ward"

Sleep clinic room The room used for the sleep test is awful. It's small, dirty, filled with old broken fixtures and a knackered bed. You have to use the top of a rubbish bin as a bedside table. The equipment they use to monitor your sleep is so restrictive you can't even sit up or turn over in bed without the wires getting tangled or becoming unplugged. If you want to go to the toilet in the night because of the equipment they use you have to call a member of staff who then has to unplug bits and then gather up all the leads and remove the main unit off the wall so you can trek out of the room down a corridor to a dismal toilet with a poorly locking door and a broken tap. Then they spend another five minutes plugging you back in. And yet I was told before I went that it was fine if I wanted to go to the loo in the night I could just get up, not a problem etc etc. Well actually it wasn't fine, it was a problem and I was made to feel like I was the one causing problems, not their equipment. Needless to say I ended up being so stressed about the whole thing that I couldn't relax at all as every time I moved something pinged off and the technician had to come back into the room. Rather than just going to sleep you end up having to lie there perfectly still stressing that if you so much as breathe the technician will have to come back in. You're not allowed any caffeine yet there was no decaffeinated tea or coffee available (a member of staff did go and source some decaf tea bags for the next days sleep tests but only because I whinged.....a lot!) So you end up dehydrated, which won't enable the tests to be reflective of your normal sleep pattern. You would think that in a department where the idea is to replicate your sleep environment there would be at least some effort by the hospital to make it slightly more homely, yet James Cook seem to have gone out of their way to replicate the worst hospital room ever instead. The sleep department need to be honest to their patients. Before I went I was led to believe everything would be fine, I could go through the night as I would at home, after all surely that's the whole point isn't it? But it is so far away from a normal nights sleep that if it wasn't for the fact that the patient needs the results to show what sleep is like for them it would be laughable.