'Red Light Protocols' Help Patients Get Much Needed Sleep

MOUNT KISCO, NY — Northern Westchester Hospital is pioneering a way of keeping a close eye on patients without disturbing their all-important rest.

In honor of World Sleep Day on Friday, March 15, the hospital is highlighting its novel efforts to respect the connection between sleep and good health.

While getting a good night's sleep is important for everyone, it can be critical for patients covering overnight in the hospital. Turning on overhead lights can be disruptive for patients' sleep, but hospital staff need to monitor and attend to patients' care throughout the night. A new innovative program at Northern Westchester Hospital (NWH) aims to improve patients' sleep quality and recovery by using a simple red light.

Since February, when attending to patients in their rooms during the night shift, nursing staff at the hospital use a hands-free magnetic red flashlight. The color red emits a longer wavelength than a white overhead light and those longer wavelengths have proven to be less visually disruptive to sleep because they don’t interrupt circadian rhythms.

The program was the brainchild of Northern Westchester Hospital's Kendra A. Deschamps, BSN, RN, MEDSURG-BC. She proposed the idea to the hospital’s Patient-Centered Innovation (PCI) Fund, which seeks to support innovative ideas from hospital team members to improve how they care for patients, families, the community and staff.

Now fully funded for a year, patients have a better opportunity to get the quality sleep they need, and it only costs about $2,220.

So far, the results have been remarkable. Patients report satisfactory sleep quality and no visual disruptions and staff reported that the red light was easy to use and accessible.

"I’m sleeping great! I didn’t notice a thing and slept through the whole night," one patient in the initial trial reported.

The importance of getting a good night's sleep is more than just anecdotal. Sleep affects immune and cardiometabolic function. It gives the body, including the brain, time to repair and recover, effectively rebuilding injured tissues.

Likewise, the science behind using red lights rather than overhead lights is well-documented, according to the hospital.

White color wavelengths are short (approximately 400nm), while red color wavelengths are longer (approximately 700nm). When eye retinal ganglion cells are exposed to short wavelengths, a signal is sent to the suprachiasmatic nucleus of the brain to reset circadian clocks/rhythms, resulting in sleep disruption The retinal ganglion cells are less sensitive to exposure to long wavelengths from red light, maintaining circadian rhythms.

The result is more uninterrupted sleep and improved sleep quality, as evidenced by the early feedback from patients.