Centre Research Fellow Dr Cassandra Pattinson has received a prestigious University of Queensland Foundation Research Excellence Award (UQ FREA) to progress her research into promoting sleep health across communities.
The annual awards celebrate the exceptional research achievements and leadership potential of individual early and mid-career researchers, and aims to foster their development as research leaders, accelerating their career development and enabling them to make a sustained impact in their disciplines.
Dr Pattinson’s project aims to understand what influences sleep at an individual, household and community level, along with the barriers and enablers, to ultimately co-design child, family, and community sleep resources for Logan and beyond.
“Sleep is foundational to children’s health and development, yet evidence rarely reaches the families and communities who most need it,” Dr Pattinson said.
“This project will involve a co-design workshop with community representatives and families in Logan, to co-produced, plain-language sleep resources tailored to local needs.”
By combining scientific knowledge with lived experience, the project will deliver a range of resources including handbooks that are accessible, usable, and trusted by the community.
“Being able to deliver something from the community’s own perspectives and design, I hope will be really powerful in being able to give caregivers more trust in the knowledge they are given, cutting through the noise that is delivered online,” Dr Pattinson added.
“I believe we will see a real sustainable and impactful difference, not only on children’s sleep, health, and development, but also the sleep and health in the greater community.”
It builds on several sleep-based research projects supported by the Life Course Centre and was directly sparked from one earlier this year which involved co-design workshops around the health and wellbeing of children in Logan.
“Through our conversations with community, we realised that information to support and strengthen sleep security and ultimately, improve sleep and outcomes for Logan children was vitally needed.”