What are your best strategies for keeping visitors from waking up your patient?

First, caring for someone is not a strategy. It is a human-to-human situation. The first word that comes to mind is "kindness." Talk directly to the visitor, not through a note on the door. Visitors, especially family, feel they need to fix the situation to be helpful, and to do so, they need to talk to the patient. If the nurse can explain to the family what the patient has been through that day and how rest will help restore them, the family may understand. The biggest issue today is that nurses do not have the time to address issues, so they take the easiest way out. Either plaster a note on the patient's door or point blank tell the visitors not to wake the patient. Instead, a kind explanation will go a million miles in accomplishing a goal and, in the long run, will save time.