"Noisy, hot room not the best place for a polysomnography"

Following a referral by my GP for poor sleep I was sent an appointment for an overnight stay & polysomnography test at Heartlands Birmingham. Helpful appointment letter explaining what would happen & instructions on what to take & where to go. Appointment duly arrived & off I went. Not knowing the hospital layout I enquired at the main reception as to the location of ward 25 & was handed a laminated card with what appeared to be helpful directions on it & was directed to the escalators by a dissinterested receptionist. A quick look at my instruction card confirmed ward 25 was on the first floor & to take the escalators to get there. After 10 minutes of back & fourth trying to find ward 25 on that floor I discovered I was in fact on the ground floor -the main entrance is actually a basement level.

Initially I thought the card was a great idea but it would appear nobody actually bothered to "test" it's correctness. I suggest you test it on someone who has never been to heartlands before & ask them to follow it to the letter.

So, after eventually finding & checking into ward 25 I was hooked up to a monitoring unit with copious amounts of glue, cables & straps. Although the gentleman who did it found the time to tell me that he did not get paid for doing it & that he & his brother ran a lucrative property business, had a cat, 3 chidren & an Audi he was unable to find the time to tell me much about my stay & test. At no point did he tell me about the camera & that I would be filmed, no reassurance about who would see the results -for all I know there could be people worldwide giggling while watching me on some medical version of you-tube. He didn't show me the separate light switch or tell me that I could turn it off if I wanted. He placed a clipboard with some sheets of paper on it & a pen saying it was a questionnaire to be filled out in the morning -he negated to mention that other information in there was frequently asked questions & information which would put me more in the picture & make me more as ease during my stay, -I only came across this the following morning when I filled out the required form. So off he went & I tried to settle. The room was a little stuffy for my liking so I opened the window -it was fitted with a safety bar so it could only be opened a couple of inches, maybe to prevent sleepless patients throwing themselves out of it. However this window is built into a recess so could only open into its own aperture impeding a flow of fresh air but still allowing the full sound of the plant room in its shared courtyard. I have an app on my phone which measured the noise at the window at a constant 60 decibels, maybe not the best place to site a polysomnography unit.

So as you can imagine, me with a sleep problem, in a hot stuffy room with the drone of the plant & the light on -it was the early hours before I found the switch to turn the light off- out of their comfort zone in a very uncomfortable bed, -the morning technician smirked when he asked if I'd enjoyed feeling the bed bars through the thin mattress, apparently the beds arrived with thicker luxurious mattresses that had been recently swapped for the thin ones though he could offer no explanation why- I can honestly say I had one of the worst nights sleep in recent years!

Overall it was not a good experience & I should imagine the results recorded will indeed show a man who slept badly, however this may well be 90% due to the surroundings. In my humble opinion this whole operation could have been made so much better if all parties concerned were to put themselves in the patients position & look outwards instead of expecting the patient to know as much as they do.