Starting today and continuing on Wednesdays throughout May, CDP is proud to introduce a new, annual webinar series examining multi-disciplinary care for Service members, Veterans, and their families. "Forces For Health: Warrior Wednesday" is a four-part webinar series via the Zoom teleconferencing platform.
During this month’s Sleep Team takeover of the CDP website, I wanted to take a minute to talk about a particularly hard hit subset of military members, Special Duty personnel. Over my career I had many opportunities to work with these elite military members both as a clinician and as an embedded consultant. Sleep problems are endemic in this population, so let’s take a quick look at who they are and what types of issues are affecting their mission readiness related to sleep.
More is better right? I have heard this often vis a vis treatment of sleep disorders, i.e. if only we had more providers trained in Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I), then we could reach more patients. Today, I want to impart to you the idea that having greater numbers of trained CBT-I providers is insufficient without addressing attitudes of referring medical providers-particularly those primary care providers (PCPs) who are our patients’ point-of-contact with the medical system.
In this video blog, Dr. Timothy Rogers welcomes you to the Snoozeum, CDP’s virtual museum of sleep disorders. The Snoozeum is built in Second Life, a virtual world that allows for an immersive experience. Your avatar (the character that represents you virtually) can explore information and exhibits 24/7.
The lack of training pertaining to the assessment and treatment of sleep disorders is not uncommon amongst behavioral healthcare providers. When I am conducting trainings for CDP, few attendees endorse receiving any formal training pertaining to the assessment and treatment of sleep disorders. However, when asked about the patients that they work with, most attendees indicate the vast majority of their patients have sleep problems. This critical knowledge gap between training and clinical needs of patients underscores the importance of training in the assessment and treatment of sleep disorders. In particular, I want to highlight some key points I have taken from my training in this area and have found to be very helpful in my clinical practice, supervision and training.