Education and training in the field of sleep medicine

Sleep disorders are highly prevalent but are under-recognized and under-diagnosed by the majority of health care providers. This article reviews recent studies of sleep medicine education in the United States and abroad and the reasons offered by most instructors for the lack of adequate education at their institutions. Quantity and quality of sleep medicine education have been lacking. Knowledge assessment is an important aspect of educational research, and several instruments for the assessment of sleep knowledge have been developed. A noteworthy development is the Sleep Academic Award program of the National Center on Sleep Disorders Research. This twenty-site, NIH-funded program has developed model interventions and sleep training curricula that are being widely disseminated. Sleep medicine fellowship training programs have also been established in the past decade and serve as the major vehicle for advanced specialty training. Finally, a number of strategies for introducing sleep medicine topics and issues into the medical curriculum have been proposed. Considering the paucity of publications in this area, our review was not restricted to studies in the past year.