Sleep & Respiratory Medicine

A consultation is a face-to-face appointment with your sleep and respiratory physician at a Advara SleepCare centre. This is an important part of your health care: it provides the opportunity to meet your specialist and ask any questions you may have.

A valid letter or referral from a doctor (such as your GP) is needed before you book a consultation. If your GP has referred you to us, they have requested specialist care or advice regarding your sleep health.

New patient consultations may take up to 45 minutes. Review consultations are approximately 30 minutes.

During the consultation, your sleep and respiratory physician will conduct a thorough assessment by asking questions about your health history, family history and your lifestyle. They may also perform simple respiratory testing or refer you to a testing facility for this.

Some patients will be asked to have tests prior to their consultation. If you are one of those patients, we will discuss your results with you at your initial consultation. Your sleep and respiratory physician will also advise if more tests or treatments such as CPAP therapy are recommended, and will talk about these options with you.

After your consultation, our sleep and respiratory physician will prepare a full report, which we will send to your referring doctor. This includes your test results and findings, along with any treatment recommendations and a follow-up schedule.

It is natural to be nervous before your consultation. However, our staff and sleep and respiratory physicians are very friendly and are here to help you. Our specialists are experts in their field, and are committed to achieving the best possible outcome for all our patients.

CPAP is considered the gold standard in treatment for Obstructive Sleep Apnoea (OSA). OSA is caused by the upper airway repeatedly collapsing during sleep for short periods of time. OSA can cause ongoing health problems. The CPAP device gently delivers pressurised air through a mask via the nose or nose and mouth. The air pressure helps keep the airways open during sleep eliminating OSA and snoring.

Long term Solutions

At Advara SleepCare, our CPAP therapy management focuses on long-term treatment success. This means providing the on-going support and communication to help you adapt to the treatment and improve your quality of life.

Telehealth is the use of videoconferencing (live video on computer) for appointments with your doctor when they are at a different location to you. You may have seen videoconferencing used on television when the host of a show is interviewing a guest overseas.

At the telehealth appointment, you (and your support person if you choose to have one) will meet with your specialist via a video link. You will see your doctor on the computer screen and will be able to talk to them as you would in a face-to-face appointment.

We understand how important getting a good night’s sleep is. If you’re having problems with sleep, sleep studies can help the Advara SleepCare team understand the causes and tailor a treatment plan for you. An in-laboratory sleep study is carried out in our specially-equipped sleep clinics. Our highly-trained technicians and nurses use a range of equipment to get a complete picture of how your body behaves during sleep. All tests are non-invasive and painless.

For many people, a home sleep study may be the best approach. You’ll need to visit your clinic during the day to collect and set up portable monitoring equipment. You then head home to go to bed as you normal and the small device records all the relevant information.

We use a range of equipment to obtain a complete picture of how well your child sleeps. This equipment allows us to see how often they wake and why, their sleep patterns such as when they are dreaming, and how they are breathing through the night.

There will be several leads and sensors attached to your child’s body with a special glue and tape. It is completely painless, and the glue will wash away in the bath or shower.

These leads connect to our equipment which a nurse will monitor overnight using a computer. Our nurse will know if a lead falls off and may need to come in to fix this during the night. Your child won’t get tangled up in the leads and most children sleep well during these tests. Our nurses will also assist if your child needs to get up to go to the bathroom during the night.

Our team of highly trained sleep technicians, nurses and sleep physicians use the information provided by this equipment to identify and investigate any issues during your child’s sleep and how it may affect their body.

This is a non-invasive test to see how much oxygen you have in your blood (oxygen saturation). This is done by assessing the distance you walk in 6-minutes and the degree of oxygen desaturation. The test can be performed with and without extra oxygen given to you.

Spirometry is a common test that assesses your lung function. It works by measuring the volume of air your lungs inhale and exhale. Part of the test involves being given a bronchial medication that can help open up your airways.

This is an overall respiratory test to measure how much air your lungs can hold, or retain. This is used to show how much oxygen is being delivered to your body.

A bronchial provocation test (BPT) is often used to assess for the presence of asthma or occasionally to demonstrate asthma control. It involves doing a breathing test after the inhalation of a substance called mannitol. The mannitol can cause airway irritation and narrowing. After each breathing test a progressively increasing dose of mannitol is given until either the breathing test result drops or the maximum dose of mannitol is given. Any airway narrowing can be reversed with Ventolin after the last test.

Ventilatory function test (VFT) also known as spirometry is a breathing test to measure airflow and airway size. It involves blowing into a mouth piece as hard and for as long as possible to measure the speed at which air is blown out and the volume of air blown out. The test is often done before and after giving medication to open airways (e.g. Ventolin).