Sleep Disordered Breathing in Spinal Cord Injury – Clinician Perspectives Wanted

25 November 2025

 

Stacey Haughton is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. Her PhD is focused on investigating alternate models of care and alternate treatment methods for the management of sleep disordered breathing (SDB) in people with spinal cord injury (SCI). SDB encompasses a broad spectrum of sleep-related breathing disorders. These include include obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA), central sleep apnoea and sleep-related hypoventilation and hypoxaemia.

Stacey would like to understand the usual management practices of clinicians who work in spinal unit injury, and clinician perceived barriers to providing evidence-based management of SDB in SCI. Specifically, SDB caused by an upper airway obstruction or OSA because OSA is the most common type of SDB in SCI and the least complicated to manage.

If you are a clinician working in a SCI rehab service in Australia and New Zealand, Stacey would love to hear from you via the below survey (link below).

There are two parts to this survey. Part A asks about how sleep disordered breathing (SDB) is usually managed in your spinal unit. Part B asks about common barriers to providing evidence-based treatment of SDB in SCI. The survey should take 20-30 minutes to complete.

Responses are confidential and only accessible by researchers and research-students involved in this project. All responses will be dei-dentified prior to analysis and publication. You can read more in the plain language statement embedded within the survey.

If you would like to participate, please follow this link: https://redcap.link/sdb-in-sci 

Stacey hopes her PhD findings will lead to improvements to clinical practice and outcomes for people living with neuromuscular diseases, such as SCI.