Today is World Sleep Day and the focus is on sleep equity for global health. Sleep is essential to health, but measurable differences in sleep health persist across populations across the world, creating additional burdens and reinforcing health inequities.
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Available to comment:
Dr Prerna Varma, Research Fellow, Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health, Sleep and Circadian Medicine Laboratory, School of Psychological Sciences
Contact details: +61, 3 9903 4840 or media@monash.edu
Languages known: English, Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi
- Designing and delivering personalised interventions for sleep health
- Engaging with organisations, end-users, and communities to design scalable, practical interventions
- Developing and implementing digital health technology (SleepSync) for shift workers
- Examining and addressing sleep and mental health in other underserved populations, including caregivers, people living with dementia, and minority populations.
The following can be attributed to Dr Varma:
“Healthy sleep should be a right, not a privilege. We need to ensure that everyone has awareness and access to resources they need to support better sleep.
“Sleep is one of the three key pillars of health. But many communities experience barriers in achieving good sleep. Addressing these sleep health inequities is necessary to create a healthier society.
“For a long time, we have thought of sleep as an individual thing, but we now know that so many structural factors, from work hours to socio-economic status, impact sleep. We need to be working with communities to address these structural barriers to improve sleep and health.”
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