NU504's Unit 3 record holds a PICO question on overnight earplugs and masks against ICU delirium, four sources searched with strings and counts, and a design profile of the nine studies that survived screening. Searches like "nu 504 unit 3 assignment example", "nu504 unit 3 sample" and "nu504 unit 3 example" land here.
Question and Search Record: Overnight Earplugs and Eye Masks and Delirium in Adult ICU Patients, With a Design Profile of the Nine Studies Retained
[Student Name]
Purdue University Global
NU504: Scientific and Analytic Approaches to Advanced Evidence-Based Practice
Unit 3 Assignment
[Instructor Name]
[Date]
Search dates, strings and counts in brackets are the student's own; the retained studies are real and cited.
Question
P: adults in intensive care units. I: earplugs, eye masks or both, worn overnight, alone or within a sleep bundle. C: usual care. O: delirium during the ICU stay, measured with the CAM-ICU or the Intensive Care Delirium Screening Checklist; sleep quality as a secondary outcome.
The outcome measure is fixed before searching, because a search that mixes delirium screening tools produces studies whose results cannot later be compared directly. The record accepts the CAM-ICU (Ely et al., 2001) and the ICDSC, and it records where a study used a different tool, as one retained trial did.
Search Table
1. PubMed. String: ("intensive care units"[MeSH] OR "critical care"[MeSH] OR ICU) AND (earplug* OR "ear plug*" OR "eye mask*" OR "eye shade*") AND (delirium OR sleep). Date: [date]. Records: [212].
2. CINAHL. String: (MH "Intensive Care Units+" OR ICU) AND (earplug* OR "eye mask*") AND (delirium OR sleep). Date: [date]. Records: [141].
3. Cochrane CENTRAL, for trials. String: (earplug* OR "eye mask*") AND (intensive care OR critical care). Date: [date]. Records: [96].
4. ClinicalTrials.gov, for registered studies. Terms: earplugs; eye mask; intensive care. Date: [date]. Records: [37].
Screening
Records identified: [486]. After duplicates removed: [361]. Screened by title and abstract: [361]; excluded [329]. Full text assessed: [32]; excluded [23], most often because the study used healthy volunteers in a simulated ICU, reported neither delirium nor sleep, or was published only as an abstract. Included: 9. The register search found [two] completed trials without posted or published results; they are listed in the appendix and are not counted among the nine.
Profile of the Retained Studies
Each entry gives design, sample, measure and whether an effect estimate is reported with a confidence interval.
1. Van Rompaey et al. (2012). Randomized trial, earplugs alone. 136 adults, Belgian university ICU. NEECHAM confusion scale; sleep by five patient questions. Interval reported: yes, hazard ratio.
2. Demoule et al. (2017). Randomized trial, earplugs and eye mask. 64 adults, French ICU. Polysomnography; clinical outcomes secondary. Interval reported: no; medians and p values.
3. Randomized trial (Hu, Jiang, Hegadoren, & Zhang, 2015), earplugs, eye masks and relaxing music. 50 randomized, 45 analyzed, cardiac surgical ICU. Richards-Campbell Sleep Questionnaire; melatonin and cortisol. Interval reported: no.
4. Patel et al. (2014). Before-and-after study of a noise and light reduction bundle. 167 and 171 patients, medical and surgical ICU. CAM-ICU; sleep efficiency. Interval reported: partly.
5. Kamdar et al. (2013). Before-and-after quality improvement study. 300 medical ICU patients. Delirium or coma; Richards-Campbell questionnaire. Interval reported: yes, odds ratio.
6. Tonna et al. (2021). Before-and-after quality improvement study. 646 surgical ICU admissions. Delirium days; sleep. Interval reported: yes.
7. Jones and Dawson (2012). Before-and-after study. 50 and 50 patients, general critical care unit. Patient ratings of sleep. Interval reported: no.
8. Litton et al. (2016). Systematic review and meta-analysis. 9 studies, 1,455 participants. Delirium, mortality, adherence. Interval reported: yes, pooled relative risk.
9. Cochrane systematic review (Hu, Jiang, Chen, et al., 2015). 30 trials of nonpharmacological sleep interventions, 1,569 participants. Delirium and sleep outcomes. Interval reported: yes.
What the Profile Predicts
The tally is three randomized trials, four before-and-after studies and two reviews, and only five of the nine report an effect with an interval. That tally predicts the appraisal: the randomized trials are small, the larger studies are uncontrolled, and much of the weight will fall on two reviews whose included studies overlap. It also shows that only one randomized trial reports delirium as an outcome with an interval, and that trial used a confusion scale rather than the CAM-ICU. The later synthesis will have to say so plainly.
References
Demoule, A., Carreira, S., Lavault, S., Pallanca, O., Morawiec, E., Mayaux, J., Arnulf, I., & Similowski, T. (2017). Impact of earplugs and eye mask on sleep in critically ill patients: A prospective randomized study. Critical Care, 21(1), 284. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13054-017-1865-0
Ely, E. W., Inouye, S. K., Bernard, G. R., Gordon, S., Francis, J., May, L., Truman, B., Speroff, T., Gautam, S., Margolin, R., Hart, R. P., & Dittus, R. (2001). Delirium in mechanically ventilated patients: Validity and reliability of the confusion assessment method for the intensive care unit (CAM-ICU). JAMA, 286(21), 2703-2710. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.286.21.2703
Hu, R.-F., Jiang, X.-Y., Chen, J., Zeng, Z., Chen, X. Y., Li, Y., Huining, X., Evans, D. J., & Wang, S. (2015). Non-pharmacological interventions for sleep promotion in the intensive care unit. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 2015(10), CD008808. https://doi.org/10.1002/14651858.CD008808.pub2
Hu, R.-F., Jiang, X.-Y., Hegadoren, K. M., & Zhang, Y.-H. (2015). Effects of earplugs and eye masks combined with relaxing music on sleep, melatonin and cortisol levels in ICU patients: A randomized controlled trial. Critical Care, 19(1), 115. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13054-015-0855-3
Jones, C., & Dawson, D. (2012). Eye masks and earplugs improve patient's perception of sleep. Nursing in Critical Care, 17(5), 247-254. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1478-5153.2012.00501.x
Kamdar, B. B., King, L. M., Collop, N. A., Sakamuri, S., Colantuoni, E., Neufeld, K. J., Bienvenu, O. J., Rowden, A. M., Touradji, P., Brower, R. G., & Needham, D. M. (2013). The effect of a quality improvement intervention on perceived sleep quality and cognition in a medical ICU. Critical Care Medicine, 41(3), 800-809. https://doi.org/10.1097/CCM.0b013e3182746442
Litton, E., Carnegie, V., Elliott, R., & Webb, S. A. R. (2016). The efficacy of earplugs as a sleep hygiene strategy for reducing delirium in the ICU: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Critical Care Medicine, 44(5), 992-999. https://doi.org/10.1097/CCM.0000000000001557
Patel, J., Baldwin, J., Bunting, P., & Laha, S. (2014). The effect of a multicomponent multidisciplinary bundle of interventions on sleep and delirium in medical and surgical intensive care patients. Anaesthesia, 69(6), 540-549. https://doi.org/10.1111/anae.12638
Tonna, J. E., Dalton, A., Presson, A. P., Zhang, C., Colantuoni, E., Lander, K., Howard, S., Beynon, J., & Kamdar, B. B. (2021). The effect of a quality improvement intervention on sleep and delirium in critically ill patients in a surgical ICU. Chest, 160(3), 899-908. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chest.2021.03.030
Van Rompaey, B., Elseviers, M. M., Van Drom, W., Fromont, V., & Jorens, P. G. (2012). The effect of earplugs during the night on the onset of delirium and sleep perception: A randomized controlled trial in intensive care patients. Critical Care, 16(3), R73. https://doi.org/10.1186/cc11330
How this NU504 Unit 3 example is structured
The record is built to feed appraisal, so it runs from question to evidence profile rather than stopping at a count. The question fixes the delirium measure first, because mixing screening tools produces results that cannot later be compared, and it says which tools were accepted. Searching a trials register is justified in one sentence: registered trials that never report results are a warning sign for publication bias. Screening is counted at each step. The profile then turns nine titles into a tally, three randomized trials, four before-and-after studies and two reviews, with only five reporting an effect with its interval, which predicts where the weight will fall in the appraisal units that follow.
Get an NU504 Unit 3 example written to your instructions
What is your question, and which delirium measure, pain scale or other outcome tool does it rest on? Send that with the Unit 3 prompt and rubric. Sources, strings and a design profile of the likely evidence come back, counts bracketed until the search is run on your side. Your first custom sample is free within 24-48h. The paper above is an original model document written by our desk, not a submitted student paper and not an official Purdue University Global document.
NU504 Unit 3 questions, answered
Why search a trial registry as well as databases?
Because published literature leans toward positive findings. Trials registered on ClinicalTrials.gov or the WHO registry platform that finished years ago but never reported results may have found nothing, and their absence makes an intervention look better than it is. Listing them does not require appraising them; it lets the synthesis acknowledge that the visible evidence may be incomplete.
Does the profile table replace an evidence table?
No. It is a sorting step, done before any study is read closely, that shows what kinds of evidence the search produced and which studies report enough statistical detail to interpret. The full evidence table, usually a later assignment, adds findings, limitations and appraisal for each row. Keeping the profile short prevents the search record from turning into an early critique.
Can I use the sample's search strings for my own question?
The structure transfers; the terms rarely do. Each concept block has to be rebuilt from your own population and outcome, using the subject headings that the databases actually assign, and run on your library's platform. The sample shows how a finished record is laid out and what the profile table checks, and the counts you submit must come from your own search.