Sleep Program Development for Industry

We teach employees how to manage their time to ensure an adequate amount of daily sleep for maximal job performance and an overall improvement in their quality of life.

More than 63 million American adults suffer from moderate to severe levels of sleepiness. Sleepiness has been identified as the cause of a growing number of on-the-job accidents. At least 25 million Americans have work shifts that are in conflict with their internal biological clocks. Fatigue was officially cited as a contributing factor in the Three Mile Island nuclear incident, the grounding of the Exxon Valdez in Prince William Sound, and the Challenger Space Shuttle Disaster.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that at least 100,000 motor vehicle crashes are caused by drowsy drivers each year, and the National Transportation Board estimates that 31% of all commercial driver fatalities and 58% of single-truck crashes are fatigue-related.

Sleep deprivation and untreated sleep disorders have been estimated by the National Sleep Foundation to cost Americans over $100 billion annually in lost productivity, medical expenses, sick leave, and property/environmental damage.

We teach employees specific strategies for managing personal, family and work-related responsibilities with the brain's daily requirement for sleep. We provide training workshops on the use of bright light regimens to effectively reset the internal biological clock to second and third shift work schedules.

We empower workers with a step-by-step plan to manage work and family responsibilities with personal sleep, nutritional, and exercise needs for greater job satisfaction and a healthy lifestyle.

Continuing Medical Education

We provide lectures, seminars, and full courses in Sleep Disorders Medicine for health care professionals in private group practices, hospitals, homecare organizations, and nursing homes.

The natural course of primary sleep disorders, intake histories, polysomnographic testing, diagnosis, and treatment plan development are taught from a systems analysis approach using actual patient cases.

In medical school, there is almost no education in basic sleep physiology, much less training in the diagnosis and treatment of sleep disorders. It is estimated that 40,000,000 Americans suffer from sleep disorders, 95% of which remain undiagnosed and untreated.

Continuing Education for Schools

We provide the latest research information to educators on daily sleep requirements in childhood and adolescence. American teenagers are chronically sleep deprived with a biologically and socially driven delay in the timing of their nightly sleep period. The daily sleep requirement changes with age into adulthood. Teens actually require 9 - 9.5 hours of sleep per 24-hour period compared to 7.5 - 8 hours in adulthood.

Survey data have demonstrated a relationship between reported sleep time and school performance -- the shorter the reported sleep time at night, the lower the student’s grade. The same survey data also found that boys with the shortest sleep times reported more physical/sports-related injuries, while girls reported more missed school days due to illness.

We provide strategies for increasing sleep time to offset the cumulative sleep "debt" in teenagers along with the use of light regimens to reset the sleep period to an earlier clock hour. We present a growing body of evidence that suggests later school start times are improving not only school performance, but also interpersonal family relationships.

We work with students and educators to develop first a dialogue, and then a behavior modification program to increase daytime alertness and school performance by increasing sleep time at night. More alert children and teenagers will decrease conduct and mood problems while increasing school attendance, performance, and overall achievement

Sleep Disorder Program Development

We prepare budgets, develop plant designs, determine equipment and staffing needs, and provide staff training for clinical sleep disorder programs. The testing standard for diagnosing primary sleep disorders is clinical polysomnography.

Clinical polysomnography consists of the continuous monitoring of 12-16 channels of electroencephalographic, electro-oculographic, electromyographic, and cardiopulmonary parameters across a night of sleep. This is a highly specialized, labor-intensive technology that requires a significant capital investment in equipment and trained personnel.

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