New Sleep Health Disparities Policy Recommendations

Background:

On June 8th, 2020, Project Sleep issued this statement standing firmly in solidarity with our Black community members and unequivocally condemning racism. We also made specific pledges including, “to highlight sleep research focused on race, racism, and sleep and health disparities, as well as advocate for more research in this area.”

In furtherance of this pledge, Project Sleep worked with our health policy experts and the sleep health disparities research community to develop specific relevant policy recommendations.  We will utilize these new recommendations in our fall advocacy efforts, kicking off with our Virtual Advocacy Training on Friday, Sept. 18th, 2020 at 2:00 p.m. ET.

Social Justice and Health Disparities Policy Recommendations

Racial-ethnic minorities are more likely to get insufficient sleep, and are more likely to have sleep disorders. Since sleep plays important roles in cardiovascular function, metabolism, immunity, mental health, and brain function, this sleep disparity creates a situation where racial/ethnic minorities are systematically set up for worse health outcomes. Not only does poor sleep lead to worse outcomes on its own, it interacts with other conditions, worsening the already-important problems associated with heart disease, diabetes, obesity, cancer, depression, and other medical conditions.

The causes of these sleep disparities are complex and involve a combination of socioeconomic, environmental, and other factors. Unfortunately, there is almost no research on targeting sleep disorders diagnosis and treatments for racial/ethnic minorities, and securing funding for sleep disparities research is extremely difficult. Moreover, there are very few researchers from racial/ethnic minority backgrounds doing this research, due in part to many systemic barriers making it difficult to develop academic careers. Some training programs, such as those funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), are showing promise.

Policy Recommendations to Advance Social Justice, Improve Equitable Training and Career Development, and Address Sleep Health Disparities:

• Training and Career Development: Ensure funding for early-career pipeline programs that help individuals of low socio-economic status and underrepresented racial/ethnic minority groups to thrive in the medical and research fields. This can include strengthening existing loan forgiveness programs, bolstering career development and training grants and fellowships (at NIH), and providing infrastructure at the institutional level for developing minority faculty.
• Community-Led Interventions: Ensure dedicated research funding to develop and implement people-centered, community-led interventions to improve community awareness and treatment of sleep disorders and sleep loss. This could include building and strengthening existing NIH and PCORI initiatives to support Community-Based Participatory Research, Community Engaged Research, Community-Derived Interventions. These would fund projects that include the community as a full partner in research.
• Education for Healthcare Providers: Provide funding to educate public health and healthcare providers on signs of sleep loss and sleep disorder issues impacting racial minorities and underrepresented groups. Care providers are increasingly aware of the importance of sleep health, but providers often lack training in how to assess and treat sleep disorders.
• Research Funding: Provide meaningful research funding to better understand and address health disparities for minorities.
• School Start Times: Ensure research funding to study how school start times impact low socio-economic and minority communities. Ample evidence shows that delaying high school start times is a public health priority, and this can disproportionately impact minority-serving schools, undercutting academic success, mental health, and other outcomes in these communities.

Your Voice Matters

Advocate with Project Sleep this fall to ensure that these recommendations are adopted and implemented. To get started, RSVP for our Virtual Advocacy Webinar on Sept. 18th at 2:00 p.m. ET. If you cannot attend the live webinar but want to get involved, RSVP anyway to receive the recording. We will help all those who sign up to reach out to their Members of Congress this fall.

Thank You

Special thanks to Dr. Michael Grandner for rallying the sleep health disparities research community together to inform this process. Thank you to our entire community for your support and positive feedback. We will keep you updated as we continue to make progress on our longterm commitments to equality, diversity and inclusion.