Over the past 16 years, World Sleep Day has become a global celebration of sleep health, a day that educates the public, inspires sleep professionals, and trends internationally on social media platforms.
Currently, a project is underway in the World Sleep Academy (WSA) to expand the reach of World Sleep Day even further. The WSA is a year-long online training program for sleep professionals with the mission of providing “accessible sleep medicine training around the world.” This is the first truly global sleep training program.
There are 38 WSA students this year from countries as diverse as Peru, Venezuela, Brazil, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Haiti, Georgia, Turkey, and others. Many of these countries have had few World Sleep Day events in the past.
To get ready for the project, WSA students first conducted a thorough overview of sleep medicine in their respective countries and made specific recommendations to improve global sleep health. Recommendations included translating sleep surveys into local languages, increasing collaboration between countries, and setting up focused research projects.
Based on what they have learned, WSA students will organize in-person, online, or social media events to reach out to primary care providers in their parts of the world. The specific focus of this project on primary care providers is intentional. Health workers in many parts of the world need basic sleep education in order to help their patients.
World Sleep Day provides the WSA students a way to leverage a global phenomenon to help their local populations.
