The Sleep Centre in SGH is the largest in Singapore with the most comprehensive range of inpatient and outpatient services for the evaluation, treatment and education of patients with sleep disorders. The range of sleep disorders managed here include obstructive sleep apnoea, sleep disordered breathing, snoring, obesity hypoventilation syndrome, chronic respiratory failure, parasomnias, nocturnal epilepsy, REM sleep disorders, leg movements disorders and insomnia. Our sleep specialists come from a multidisciplinary background with respiratory physicians, ENT surgeons, neurologist, psychiatrists and psychologists all working in a collaborative environment.
We offer outpatient consultation services and both portable home and inpatient sleep studies. These sleep studies include measurements of brain wave activity, respiratory breathing patterns and leg movements and inpatient studies are fully attended by sleep technologists. We are proud to be the only Australasian Sleep Association/National Association of Testing Authorities-accredited sleep service in Asia.
History of Sleep Disorders Unit in SGH:
Dr K. Puvanendran, a Neurologist from SGH, pioneered Sleep Medicine in Singapore. He led a multidisciplinary team of doctors and sleep technologists and established Singapore's first dedicated sleep laboratory in Ward 48 in 1987, supported partly by generous donations from the Shaw Foundation. Initial sleep studies were done using a SIEMENS 16 channel EEG machine with pen and paper. More than 1000 paper pages had to be visually analyzed each night! Thankfully, digital recording overtook analog in the late 1980s.
