Background: Critically ill patients suffer from sleep pattern disturbances in intensive care units, negatively affecting their recovery. With this, nurses are faced with a great challenge to deal with these disturbances in critically ill patients. Aim: This study aimed to explore the effectiveness of alternative methods to nursing strategies for promoting night sleep pattern among coronary intensive care patients. Methods: The study was conducted at the coronary intensive care unit (CCU) of the Aswan University Hospital (Aswan– Egypt). Pertinent data were collected utilizing two tools. The first tool was the quality of sleep sheet, which included two parts: personal bio demographic data and a Richards–Campbell sleep questionnaire for monitoring the sleep qualities of ICU patients. The second tool was the stress factors in the ICU questionnaire used to measure stress perception. A quantitative survey was carried out to meet the aim of this study, and the purposive sample included 85 conscious CCU patients. Results: Implementation of the alternative methods to nursing strategies revealed highly significant impacts regarding the domains in stress factor perception (p < 0.000) and items of sleep quality in the ICU. Significant differences were found in the means of sleep depth, latency, returning to sleep, sleep quality, and noise in the ICU (p < 0.005). Conclusion: Alternative nursing strategies improved the sleep quality of ICU patients using the following alternative methods performed by nurses, which included aromatherapy, body massage, listening to calm music, and decrease of stress factors in the ICU. Therefore, it is recommended to use these alternative nursing strategies in intensive care units to improve the patients’ night sleep pattern.

Keywords: Alternative strategies Sleep pattern Coronary intensive care Nursing