Sleep restriction therapy in primary care

Co-chair: Dr Samuel Finnikin (@sfinnikin)

Clinical Research Fellow, Institute of Applied Health Research, university of Birmingham

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Email: finniksj@bham.ac.uk

Background

Dr Finnikin did his undergraduate medical degree at the University of Birmingham and, after a few years as a military doctor, went on to train as a GP. During this training, he developed undertook a masters in primary care which involved a research project into the influence of childcare sickness exclusion policies on the prescribing of antibiotics in primary care.

On completion of his GP training, Dr Finnikin started working as a GP in Sutton Coldfield and continued his academic work as an NIHR In-Practice Fellow. He has used Big Data to explore the use of risk scoring to guide the prescribing of statins in primary care and he has also been involved in research in the out-of-hours setting.

Dr Finnikin is interested in how shared decision making can be harnessed to improve clinical care in general practice.

Article

Clinical and cost-effectiveness of nurse-delivered sleep restriction therapy for insomnia in primary care (HABIT): a pragmatic, superiority, open-label, randomised controlled trial. Simon D Kyle, A Niroshan Siriwardena, Colin A Espie, Yaling Yang, Stavros Petrou, Emma Ogburn, Nargis Begum, Leonie F Maurer, Barbara Robinson, Caroline Gardner, Victoria Lee, Stephanie Armstrong, Julie Pattinson, Sam Mort, Eleanor Temple, Victoria Harris, Ly-Mee Yu, Peter Bower, Paul Aveyard, Clinical and cost-effectiveness of nurse-delivered sleep restriction therapy for insomnia in primary care (HABIT): a pragmatic, superiority, open-label, randomised controlled trial, The Lancet, 2023, ISSN 0140-6736, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(23)00683-9.

Questions

• Do you think that the inclusion criteria would encompass many of your patients presenting with sleep problems?
• This was an open label and pragmatic study, Do you have any concerns about the methods used?
• What do you make of table 1 (the baseline characteristics of the participants)
• What do you think of the intervention? Is it effective and could it be delivered in primary care?
• The paper states there is no evidence that sleep hygiene alone is effective as a monotherapy. Do you think this study results may change the advice you give to patients now or in the future?