Australia caught napping on sleep policy

It’s been called ‘a silent public health crisis’ that remains overlooked in national policy. Yet most of us spend a third of our lives doing it – and, for two out of five of us, not well.
 
Researchers have issued a ‘wake-up call’ to the Federal Government, with the release of a new ‘Waking up to Australia’s sleep health’ consensus statement.
 
With up to 40% of Australians not getting enough sleep, the statement calls for sleep, and its physical and fiscal tolls, to be given the same attention as diet and exercise in the nation’s health agenda.
 
Led by Flinders University, the consensus statement comes from the Network of Early Career Sleep Researchers in Training, a council of the Australasian Sleep Association (ASA).
 
Lead author, Dr Hannah Scott, said sleep remains ‘largely absent from Australia’s health priorities.’
 
‘Australia cannot afford to keep hitting snooze on sleep,’ she said.
 
In addition to almost half of Australians getting insufficient sleep, 10% live with chronic insomnia, and around 15% with obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA). 
 
Apart from its impact on quality of life, poor sleep is linked to a higher risk of a range of chronic health conditions, mental health disorders and workplace accidents.
 
It also has a financial impact. In 2019–20, sleep-related health issues were estimated to cost the Australian economy around $75.5 billion – up from $66.3 billion three years earlier.

In a recent newsGP poll, 64% of respondents named sleep health as a topic brought up with equal frequency as diet and exercise.
 
The consensus statement is a follow-up to the Parliamentary inquiry into sleep, Bedtime Reading: Inquiry into Sleep Health Awareness in Australia, and recommends improved training for health professionals on sleep health.
 
It states that current medical education in Australia devotes just six hours’ training to the topic of sleep.
 
However, GP and leading sleep health researcher Professor Nick Zwar said it is difficult to give sleep more time in an undergraduate curriculum as there is ‘so much to cover’.
 
‘I would think there’s more about sleep that comes up in clinical education, in the hospitals or in primary care, than in formal education,’ he told newsGP.
 
‘A medical student sitting with a GP for a six-week term, they are going to see patients coming into the GP who are having sleep difficulties. And that will not be picked up in terms of surveys of formal education about sleep.
 
‘That’s when the rubber hits the road; GPs are not infrequently the first port of call for people who have sleep problems, or whose health may be affected by a sleep problem.’
 
However, Professor Zwar said he will ‘definitely’ welcome more support for GPs to manage sleep disorders.
 
In his own qualitative work with GPs, he said ‘the message was clear’ that they see chronic insomnia and OSA as important parts of practice.
 
‘In a way, for GPs in metropolitan areas, OSA was easier to manage because they could refer it away to a sleep lab or a sleep physician, providing the patient could afford to see them,’ Dr Zwar said.
 
‘But for chronic insomnia, which is insomnia for more than three months – and that’s a pretty common presentation – the GPs saw it as very much as their job to manage it, but they were not feeling that they had necessarily the resources or skills to do so.’
 
Professor Zwar believes that poor sleep has increased due to a range of issues, including modern society being ‘not terribly conducive to healthy sleep’, and an ageing population increasing the rate of OSA.
 
‘It’s an important public health issue, and one where – and this is what this report and other Parliamentary inquiries are trying to do – there hasn’t been the amount of attention it deserves,’ he said.
 
‘The health implications [of poor sleep] are not insignificant, and the quality of life that people have is definitely impacted by sleep problems.’
 
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