The goal of this project is to provide accessible online education to healthcare providers about screening, assessing, and treating pediatric insomnia. Promoting Healthy Sleep is currently going through a usability study, and we are recruiting physicians, psychologists, nurses, and allied health professionals.
If you are interested in participating or would like more program information, please email hs4hc@dal.ca!
Why is this program needed?
Most healthcare providers in Canada do not receive formal training in the screening, assessment, or management of pediatric insomnia. While the first line of treatment for insomnia is behavioural interventions, approximately three-quarters of family physicians and pediatricians recommend sedating medication to treat insomnia in children, even though there are no approved medications for pediatric insomnia.1, 2
What is the Promoting Healthy Sleep program?
The goal of the Promoting Healthy Sleep: An eLearning Program for Healthcare Providers program is to provide accessible, online sleep education to healthcare providers who will be screening, assessing, and treating pediatric insomnia. To ensure easy access, scalability, and cost-effectiveness, the Promoting Healthy Sleep program was created as an online/eLearning program to address barriers. The Promoting Healthy Sleep program includes four sessions delivered via video, which takes approximately two hours to complete. Once participants complete a session, they complete a short self-assessment quiz before they can move onto the next session. The eLearning program was developed based on the current literature and in combination with the developers’ (Drs. Penny Corkum, Shelly Weiss, and Elizabeth Keys) clinical knowledge and experiences. Once all four sessions are completed, participants receive a certificate of completion that they can download for their professional development portfolio.
What is the research that supports this program?
This is a new program, and as such, the first step was to test whether healthcare providers find the program usable and implementable. The current usability study includes 22 healthcare providers working in Canada from four groups (i.e., physicians, psychologists, nurses, allied health professionals). Participants completed the Promoting Healthy Sleep program, and completed questionnaires after each of the four sessions and at the end of the program in order to collect feedback about the program’s usability from the end-users’ perspective. They also completed questionnaires about their sleep knowledge before and after the program.
The majority of participants (n=18) stated that the program was ready to be used by other healthcare providers. Furthermore, most participants (n=20) stated they were satisfied with the information and format of the Promoting Healthy Sleep program. Sleep knowledge significantly increased from pre- to post-intervention, and overall, participants found the program useful and ready to be implemented, with minimal modifications to the program required.
What are the next steps?
For the next study, we will invite people that have relevant lived experience (i.e., parents/caregivers of children with pediatric insomnia) to review the program and participate in qualitative interviews, where they will provide feedback about the content of the program. The feedback provided by those with lived experience and healthcare providers will be used to determine what modifications are needed in the Promoting Healthy Sleep program before testing the effectiveness of this program. The Promoting Healthy Sleep program has the potential to provide accessible training in pediatric insomnia to healthcare providers across Canada that is evidence-informed, and end-user supported.
References
- Bock, D. E., Roach-Fox, E., Seabrook, J. A., Rieder, M. J., & Matsui, D. (2016). Sleep-promoting medications in children: Physician prescribing habits in Southwestern Ontario, Canada. Sleep Medicine, 17, 52–56. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sleep.2015.10.003
- Morin, C. M., LeBlanc, M., Bélanger, L., Ivers, H., Mérette, C., & Savard, J. (2011). Prevalence of Insomnia and its Treatment in Canada. The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, 56(9), 540–548. https://doi.org/10.1177/070674371105600905