Today we are celebrating World Sleep Day, which aims to raise awareness of the importance of sleep health.
Sleep plays a vital role in good health and wellbeing throughout our life. The way we feel while we are awake depends in part on what happens while we are sleeping.
During sleep, our body is working to support healthy brain function and maintain our physical health. Getting inadequate sleep over time can raise our risk for chronic (long-term) health problems, including heart disease, high blood pressure, dementia, diabetes, stroke and obesity. It can also affect how well we think, react, work, learn, and interact with others.
Learning how sleep affects our heart and circulatory system, metabolism, respiratory system, and immune system helps us to understand how much sleep we need.
Sleep hygiene is important to improve sleep quality. There are seven important steps to help with this:
- Get up at the same time every day
- Head outside for natural light
- Do 30 minutes of exercise every day
- Avoid caffeinated drinks
- Don’t go to bed too full, hungry or thirsty
- Don’t use electronic devices one hour before bed
- Ensure the bedroom is cool, dark and quiet
In April last year, the Respiratory Physiology team in the Respiratory Department at Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust (MTW) introduced a new Sleep Service for sleep apnoea disease, which is when a person’s breathing stops and starts while they sleep. The service provides patients with diagnostic devices they can take home which measure saturations, airflow, and help assess quality of sleep. Results then determine whether a patient needs to wear a continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) mask to treat sleep apnoea. The service also offers non-invasive treatment (NIV) for obesity-hypoventilation syndrome (OHS), a breathing disorder that affects some people with obesity.
The Sleep Service is available to both outpatients and inpatients, forming an important step forward in their recovery, and means patients in the west Kent area now have access to a local sleep and diagnostic service.
To run the service, the Respiratory Physiology team recruited experienced physiologists with an interest in developing their skills and knowledge in sleep. The team are also supporting a range of training programmes, to enable future support of the service.
Ricardo Ginjo Sales, MTW’s Principal Respiratory Physiologist who has worked on the implementation and delivery of the service, said: “Everyone in our team has been working hard to develop the Sleep Service to support our patients, and it is progressing well – over the last 12 months, we have performed over 1,062 sleep diagnostic investigations, 247 patients are being treated for obstructive sleep apnoea with CPAP therapy and 11 are on NIV treatment for OHS.”
The team has received fantastic feedback from patients using the Sleep Service. Mr Keelty recently began his CPAP therapy, and said: ““I was greeted very professionally and the treatment was also explained in great detail. The service received was very professional and the whole team were great. Thank you for a great service!”
Mr Bradford, who has been supported by the Sleep Service over the past month, commented: “Being finally diagnosed and treated for sleep apnoea has resulted in a 100% improvement in my quality of life. Thank you to the respiratory team for helping me.”
Speaking about the success of the Sleep Service, Dr Philip ‘David’ Davidson, Respiratory Consultant Lead, said: “Ricardo and the Lung Function team have done exceptionally well to get the MTW Sleep Service up and running, and they have helped provide a vital local service for patients within our catchment area. We have been able to support referrals from many other specialties including the Bariatric team, Cardiology team, Pre-operative team, Ear Nose and Throat (ENT), Neurology and even Ophthalmology, and I am exceptionally proud of the high level of care that we can now provide to patients.”