Tuesday 4 July 2023 4:19pm
EDOR director Professor Rachael Taylor, and her team, have secured a highly competitive Programme Grant from the Health Research Council of New Zealand (HRC).
The $5M grant is split over four projects that will research effective ways to improve sleep for tamariki and rangitahi in Aotearoa New Zealand. The programme is inspired by previous work from this team, showing that sleep has the potential to prevent and treat childhood obesity and improve other aspects of health, including wellbeing.
Whakatipu Rakatira: Improving sleep as a vehicle to grow healthy future leaders
The Whakatipu Rakatira programme will involve four research projects that aim to improve sleep, as a pathway to meaningful improvements in health and wellbeing for all young people in Aotearoa.
The Whakatipu Rakatira programme
- Project 1: Co-design a Kaupapa Māori approach for improving sleep and wellbeing in pēpi and their caregivers.
- Project 2. Provide experimental evidence regarding the impact of pre-bed behaviours on sleep in children.
- Project 3. Test an online sleep intervention for young teens that is optimally effective, acceptable, and scalable.
- Project 4: Investigate how delaying school start times might improve sleep and wellbeing in senior students.
The EDOR sleep team
Alongside Professor Taylor, several other EDOR researchers are involved in the programme, including Dr Justine Camp, Professor Barbara Galland and Associate Professor Jill Haszard, who will be leading different aspects of the research programme.
Over the past two decades, EDOR members have conducted a number of research projects looking at the relationship between sleep, obesity, diabetes and wellbeing. These data have played a pivotal role in informing the projects that make up the Whakatipu Rakatira programme.
EDOR's sleep research
- POI - Prevention of overweight in infancy
- Moemoeā - sleep, health, communication, and wellbeing
- DREAM - Diet, Rest, Eating and Activity Monitoring
- BED - how the use of electronic media before and in-bed affects sleep
In the News
- HRC grants $51 million to Otago researchers, University of Otago Bulletin, 4 July 2023
- Better patient care at heart of NZ's $35M spend on new research programmes, Health Research Council NZ, 4 July 2023
