Sleep is an essential activity of daily living that is often overlooked in approaches to caring for people with intellectual disabilities (IDs). Poor sleep, insomnia or disrupted sleep can have wide-ranging effects on the health and well-being of people with ID resulting in many adverse consequences.
This article outlines the main challenges that people with ID may have initiating and sustaining sleep, explains the nature, prevalence and causes of sleeping problems they experience and discusses a variety of assessments of sleeping issues. It also examines sleep maintenance, management and sleep hygiene approaches to support this cohort using a person-centred nursing care plan and concludes with some suggestions for sleep maintenance and hygiene. Good sleep hygiene should form a central element of caring for people with ID and this article offers suggestions about care planning approaches to enable good quality sleep experiences for people with ID.
Learning Disability Practice. doi: 10.7748/ldp.2019.e1958
Peer reviewThis article has been subject to external double-blind peer review and has been checked for plagiarism using automated software
Correspondence Conflict of interestNone declared
Horan P, Fleming S, Cleary M et al (2019) ‘Sweet dreams’: an evidence-based approach to effective sleep hygiene maintenance for people with an intellectual disability. Learning Disability Practice. doi: 10.7748/ldp.2019.e1958
Published online: 14 March 2019
or
Alternatively, you can purchase access to this article for the next seven days. Buy now
Are you a student? Our student subscription has content especially for you.
Find out more
