Funding outcome

Sleep plays a critical role in maintaining well-being as it nurtures physical and mental development. Nevertheless, a consistent decline in children's sleep has been recognized as a public health concern with insufficient sleep predating poor overall health in youth. Poor sleep behaviour has been associated with negative impacts on children's physical and psychosocial health including obesity, diabetes, anxiety, impaired concentration, physical inactivity and poorer immune function. Hence, for the goal of improving children's health and well-being, sleep has been identified as a topic of health promotion interest in school settings. While previous findings have demonstrated the effectiveness of school-based health promotion programs on improving physical activity and healthy eating, minimal research exists for sleep. This project aims to incorporate the perspectives and suggestions of stakeholders (students, parents, and teachers) in improving school-based sleep education; the generated knowledge will be integrated into practice in hopes of impacting future policies and strategies in promoting healthy sleep behaviours. To summarize research findings from stakeholder interviews, infographics and corresponding mediums (i.e., videos, reports, publications) will be produced. Complementarily, feedback from end users (parents, teachers, school administrators, practitioners) of this knowledge will inform the summary product. Because stakeholder consensus is critical in establishing recommendations, a consequent workshop will be conducted to identify potential policy/practice suggestions that can be integrated into existing school-based sleep education.