Start with the boring essentials
The boring things become extremely interesting when they are missing.
Keep these together:
- Phone and charger.
- Any regular medication and/or the medication information your hospital has asked you to bring.
- Glasses, hearing aids and their cases or chargers.
- Bank card.
- Pyjamas or a nightie.
- Underwear and socks.
- Toothbrush and your normal basic toiletries.
If you have five more minutes to pack properly, that is where the comfort stuff earns its place.
Sleep kit is not being precious
A single night on a ward is still a whole night on a ward.
There will be corridor light, observation rounds, alarms, bins, doors, people snoring and somebody somewhere having a conversation at a volume more suited to the National Theatre.
An eye mask and decent earplugs take almost no bag space. If you already use a soft sleep headband or headphones you can lie on comfortably, bring those too.
Your own pillow and pillowcase are not essential, obviously. They are also one of the things we have been disproportionately pleased to see arrive through the ward doors.
A lightweight blanket is lovely if you run cold and much easier to manage than dragging half your duvet from home. Ward blankets are astonishingly indestructible things — apparently made from equal parts Teflon, Victorian engineering and a determination to twist themselves around your legs at 3am.
What to wear
Hospital gowns have many qualities. Dignity is not always one of them.
Once you are able to wear your own things, soft nightwear and a warm layer make an enormous difference.
Button-front pyjamas or a front-opening nightie are useful when there is a cannula, line or sore arm to work around. A cardigan or zip hoodie does the same job during the day.
For your feet, bring slippers with a back and a grippy sole, or grip socks. The very beautiful backless slippers you reserve for wandering majestically around your bedroom are less useful when you are tired, attached to equipment or being encouraged to walk safely.
Washing without moving house into the bathroom
For one or two nights, keep the wash kit compact.
Toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant, hairbrush or comb and the few things you actually use. A hanging wash bag is genuinely useful because shared hospital bathrooms are rarely blessed with generous, dry shelving.
A bath sheet from home is bulky, but if you know you will want a proper shower and have room in the bag, it beats discovering the tiny hospital towel has the dimensions and absorbency of a large tea towel. The small white towel is so familiar to us it practically deserves standard-issue status.
Keep fragrances restrained in a shared bay. When people feel sick, smells that are perfectly pleasant at home can become everybody’s problem very quickly.
The cable problem
The charger is only useful if it reaches you.
Sockets can be behind the bed, above it or somewhere apparently selected by a person who has never attempted to use a phone while admitted to hospital.
A long charging cable is one of our genuine ward essentials. Bring the plug too. It sounds obvious until somebody proudly arrives with three metres of cable and absolutely no means of connecting it to the wall.
What to do with the hours
You probably do not need a suitcase of entertainment. Unless your brain happens to require seventeen possible activities before it agrees to do one of them — in which case we understand the temptation to buy a bigger suitcase.
Take one or two things that work when your concentration is poor and you can be interrupted at any moment: downloaded programmes, headphones, an audiobook, puzzle or colouring book, or an iPad/tablet if you already own one.
The key is low commitment. Hospital is full of people opening curtains at exactly the point your brain has finally engaged with something. Things like colouring, puzzle books or a small tactile puzzle such as Push Peel work well because you can stop instantly and come back later.
Keep the bag small enough to live with
Bed spaces are not bedrooms and storage is limited.
A decent holdall that can stay together is easier than six carrier bags slowly colonising the floor, chair and windowsill. Pick one you actually like — you are going to be looking at it for a while.
Put your name on anything you would be upset to lose, especially chargers, pillows, blankets and wash bags. Things move. Beds move. People move. Laundry definitely moves.
We have made printable belongings labels for exactly this reason. Print a sheet before you go in and label anything you would genuinely mind losing.
If one night becomes more
Do not panic-pack for every possibility.
If the stay gets longer, somebody can bring a second bag with fresh clothes, a few more comforts and anything you suddenly realise you care deeply about after 24 hours on a ward.
The easiest favour you can do Future Whoever-Is-Packing-For-You is make the important things obvious at home. A quick photo of the right pyjamas is often more useful than the sentence “you know, the nice ones”.
This is practical guidance, not medical advice. Hospitals, wards and individual needs vary, so use what helps and ignore what doesn’t. For anything clinical, follow the advice of the healthcare team looking after you.
Printed from thesicklist.co.uk/guides/overnight-hospital-bag