Sleep medicine certification for physicians in Spain

Montserrat JM, Teran-Santos J, Puertas JF.  European Respiratory Journal 04/2015; 45(4):1189-1191. S

Sleep medicine is a rapidly growing field. At present, there is a lack of standardisation and the quality of clinical decisions may vary widely. The best way to resolve this problem is to establish a procedure for certification, for both centres and physicians [1]. However, the implementation of a procedure of this kind is difficult, for a variety of reasons; for example, the wide range of criteria applied by different professional societies and the apparent perception that sleep diseases belong to different medical specialties. To date, several procedures have been developed to perform the certification process. In some countries, for instance, the USA [1–3], sleep medicine is considered an independent medical subspecialty, and in Germany [4, 5] and Saudi Arabia [6], its status as a subspecialty has been officially acknowledged. In other countries, expertise is certified by scientific societies or academic institutions. The European Sleep Research Society started to certify sleep physicians in 2012 and it recently published its catalogue for sleep medicine certification [7, 8]

Ventana Cientifica. Octibre 2015. Artículo 32
Sleep medicine certification for physicians in Spain.