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National Sleep Awareness Week takes place March 5-12 and culminates with Daylight Savings. Then there is globally celebrated World Sleep Day organized by the World Sleep Society occurring on March 17.

During the month of March, Community Sleep Coach will again be holding Educational Open Houses at the Kelowna office. People can drop by for a casual yet informative personal introduction to sleep & associated abnormalities.

Alena Krizek is the Founder of Community Sleep Coach Inc. here in Kelowna. She is a Certified Clinical Sleep Educator and has been involved in the field of sleep medicine for the past 20 years, primarily in a clinical setting as a Registered Polysomnographic Technologist. More recently in her role as Community Sleep Coach, she has been dedicating time as a sleep advocate raising sleep disorder awareness within the community and across Canada.

Untreated sleep disorders cost billions of dollars each year and it should be in our best interest to ensure that sleep care and education is accessible. This is why she founded Community Sleep Coach; to offer an alternative sleep resource when sleep specialists are not available or waitlists are too long. She provides sleep education and a preliminary assessment which can steer people in the right direction while on the path to formal diagnosis by a specialist and ultimate treatment. Community Sleep Coach is also now available to provide a mobile sleep consultation service for regions that do not have sleep labs or sleep specialists within the community. General practitioners can book this service for their clinics directly. This type of resource is currently not covered by healthcare or by extended health benefits but she hopes that will change in the foreseeable future. This is a form of preventative care which will ultimately save dollars and even lives in the long run. Untreated sleep apnea for instance, can lead to expensive hospital stays when folks suffer a heart attack or stroke as a result.