Nurses’ Experiences with Inpatient Care in Single-Bed Rooms: Literature Review

Abstract

Hospital patient wards were increasingly abandoning multi-bed Nightingale wards for sin-gle-patient rooms layouts. Previous studies pointed to the benefits of single-bed hospital rooms for patients. Less research was done on the advantages and challenges that nurses perceived while caring for patients in these environments. The objective of this study was to examine what experiences nurses had had when caring for patients in inpatient ward single-bed rooms. The study was undertaken in the form of a qualitative literature review. Peer-reviewed articles found in academic search databases that focused on the hospital nurses' point of view working on the inpatient ward were reviewed and analysed. The study identified common themes in the literature that included significant effects that single-patient ward layouts had on nurses, patients and relatives communication practic-es, challenges to patient monitoring in single-bed rooms, opportunities for holistic and individualized nursing care and demands on nurses' working environments. Advantages that single-patient rooms had on patient privacy and satisfaction were not clearly demonstrated when it came to the experiences that nurses had when working on these wards. Based on these findings, it was proposed that more research into the effects that single-patient wards had on staff communication, patient monitoring and nurses' working environments be conducted.