Awareness and practice of sleep hygiene among UniKL MBBS students and its association to sleep quality

Poor sleep quality is a common problem among medical students and often leads to daytime hypersomnolence and fatigue. Having a good sleep hygiene is considered to be an effective way to improve sleep quality. The purpose of this study is to assess students' sleep hygiene awareness and practices and evaluate their sleep quality. The association of sleep quality with sleep hygiene awareness and practice was also explored. The study was a cross-sectional, self-administered, and questionnaire-based study. A total of 262 UniKL RCMP MBBS students were recruited to complete sleep questionnaires adopted from internationally recognized instruments, like Sleep Hygiene Index (SHI); to assess sleep hygiene and Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI); to assess sleep quality. It was found that more than half of the participants (57.3%) had good knowledge on sleep hygiene. However, most of them (82.4%) had poor sleep hygiene practice. 65.6% of the students were also found to have poor sleep quality. Sleep quality was strongly correlated with sleep hygiene practice (p< 0.01) but not with sleep hygiene knowledge (p> 0.05). Appropriate measures and sleep hygiene education should be emphasized in order to raise awareness on the importance of adopting a good practice of sleep hygiene among the students.