House of Representatives Standing Committee on Health, Aged Care and Sport have released their findings from their inquiry into Sleep Health Awareness in Australia. It’s a long read, and pretty boring unless you work in the sleep industry, at 171 pages… its almost an homage to the title of the paper – Bedtime reading.
They essentially highlights the following:
- Poor sleep is prevalent in Australia, and this costs us a lot of money.
- A lot of these costs are felt in the workplace, and may have implications on safety for some professions but this is not well understood on the whole.
- There are a range of sleep disorders that also contribute to poor sleep in Australia.
- Diagnosing and managing sleep disorders costs the country a lot of money, and yet these services may not meet the need of all Australians.
- Sleep disorders are diagnosed and managed in a variety of ways in Australia.
- Stakeholders have varying opinions relating to how sleep disorders should be diagnosed and managed, this is often consistent with their particular service model.
- There have been a lot of changes to how the diagnosis and management of sleep disorders are funded by medicare since November 2018. Stakeholders also have varying opinions on the outcome of these changes.
They then make a variety of recommendations relating to the above issues.
What does this all mean?
Probably not a lot in all reality for now, but don’t be surprised to see some sleep related “get healthy” type government adds in the next year or two.
For those inclined, here is the full paper:
