文摘
Sleep medicine is well established in Germany as an interdisciplinary medical subject. The area of sleep medicine provides quality control of structure, personnel, and procedures in the form of sleep center accreditation, board certification for physicians, psychologists, scientists, and medical technicians, and a peer review process for procedures in the sleep laboratory, the documentation of patient results, and the archiving of patient files. The newly developed evidence-based guideline on nonrestorative sleep and sleep disorders with a clinical algorithm for diagnostic and treatment pathways explains and defines sleep medicine practice. Therefore, there is a need for a sleep medicine service model with a high level of quality and different levels of sleep medicine care. A model with four levels of care is presented in this article. The first level is an interdisciplinary sleep medicine center which also provides full training and educational facilities. The second level offers the same service quality but without the full training program. The third level corresponds to a sleep laboratory closely associated with the department of origin and with a specialization in some main sleep disorders according to patient referral. The fourth level corresponds to a sleep physician who does not necessarily own all technical equipment associated with a sleep center; however, this expert physician has sleep medicine board certification and is the specialized physician to whom patients with complaints of nonrestorative sleep are referred. The sleep medicine service model presented here focuses primarily on individual sleep medicine competence and only secondarily on equipment. The equipment available is used to distinguish the four levels.