The Woolcock Institute of Medical Research

Kathy Zvirblis is a neurophysiology scientist who is leading the development of the Woolcock Clinic’s integrated paediatric service combining neurology, EEG testing and sleep studies in a one-stop model of care. Here, she addresses common concerns about sleep studies.

What is the biggest concern for people having a sleep study?

Most people ask, “am I actually going to be able to sleep?” The first part of the answer to that is we have double beds and comfortable rooms with private ensuites – like a hotel room, not a hospital ward with someone in the bed next to them. Our facilities are probably a lot newer than in many other places and we make them as comfortable as possible in terms of the environment.

Second, if they’re concerned about being away from their home comforts – their pillow, their mattress – so we tell them to bring their own pillow, they could bring in a mattress topper or a noise machine, anything from home that's normal for them. It won’t be their own bed but many of our patients tell us that our mattresses are comfortable.

Couldn’t I just have a home sleep study?

You may not sleep as well in our sleep lab as you would in your own bed, but an in-lab study is better because the data we get will be better than what you can get from a home study. It's more comprehensive and the interpretation of that data is better because of the experience of everyone involved.

We know that if the referral comes from a neurologist, for example, that they could be looking for something that a GP wouldn’t be looking for. We can look more carefully at the brain waves, we can put more leads on, we can do more extensive investigations.

How long does the process take?

When we set up a sleep study, we do it all at once and then the tech will leave. Everything's on and then they're gone - they're not coming in and out doing one thing here, one thing there. It can take up to an hour but then the only time they come back into the room overnight is if something does come off and they do that without turning the lights on, quietly with very minimal disturbance. If they don't have to go in, they won't. If it's something that's quite important, then they will go in.

Won’t I get tangled up in all those wires?

When people see a picture of a sleep study, they see the wires coming off everywhere and think “am I going to be able to sleep with all this on”. For a small percentage of people, they will find it uncomfortable and probably not get as good of a quality of sleep as they would at home. For everybody else, there's no problem at all. The way that we wire everything up ensures the wires aren't obtrusive. While you're sleeping, the device is tucked away in the corner and there's enough leeway on all the wires so that you can move comfortably, not be restricted in the bed and not enough for you to get tangled up in them. That's all explained when our patients arrive for their sleep study.

Will anxiety affect the quality of my sleep and my sleep study?

It’s normal to have concerns about your sleep study. It’s our sleep technicians’ job to make them feel comfortable from the moment they walk through the door. People generally come straight out with all their concerns and the experience of our staff, their level of training and our emphasis on patient comfort means we are we know how to make sure that their needs are accommodated wherever possible.

What about children (and their parents)?

When we work with children, we have to manage the anxiety of both the child and the parent and make sure we get the reading we need.

Our staff are very well versed in dealing with children, the level of experience they have is unmatched. Often, we’ll have a parent who says ‘look, my child's not going to cooperate with this, they’re going to be pulling the wires off after an hour’. Our staff are able to allay their fears and magically just get everything on the child without any hassles whatsoever.

Before they come in, we stress that they should bring any distractions that will help, any little thing that will occupy their child while we put everything on. Our sleep technicians don't look too clinical – we don't wear masks or lab coats – but they’re trained professionals, and they know how to work with children.

For paediatric sleep studies, the parent is in the room with the child the whole time, in their own separate bed. We have stickers with little cartoon cats on them, and we explain that it's just a bunch of stickers. Everything is just a sticker, there’s no needles, nothing that's going to hurt. Even when we take the sensors off, it doesn't hurt. Some of them are on the skin but a lot of them go on top of their pyjamas. It’s all stuff that they can see, they can touch.

What happens if something goes wrong?

If a sensor falls off during the night, that’s fine. Our sleep technicians can deal with that.

A successful sleep study is a combination of what they do in the night and what we do in the day to analyse the results. If there are bits missing, staff with the level of experience we have at the Woolcock can make the most from what we do get.

I assess our paediatric sleep studies, and I do that with 20 years’ paediatric experience. It’s a matter of knowing what information is most valuable; what do we look at a bit more closely; what sensors don’t concern us too much if they fall off. It's being able to put the pieces together of what we're seeing.

In the past six months we haven’t had a sleep study which didn’t produce useful results. There's been a couple of times when the patient woke up before 4am and wanted to go home – that was fine, we had something up to that point. It would be very rare for us to have a sleep study that failed completely.

Find out more

• Welcome to the Woolcock Clinic
• Sleep Clinic
• Paediatric Sleep Clinic