Sleep hygiene, causes of sleep disruption, and sleep disorder interventions are recent, important topics of health and cultural awareness. The better one’s sleep quality over the life span, the better one’s health status and health outcomes, so who has reliable access to quality sleep is not just a clinical matter, but one for ethics and justice. This theme issue’s focus is broader than sleep pathologies and investigates how sleep is perhaps best conceived as a communal, natural resource. We all need clean air and water, shelter, nutritionally dense food, and sleep. Of course, we sleep as individuals, but our common human interest in good sleep generates collective obligations to respond equitably to chronic health conditions that exacerbate poor sleep patterns, to support conditions for feeling safe, peaceful, and calm enough to rest, and to mitigate noise and light pollution that compromise our and our neighbors’ sleep environments.
We welcome wide-ranging manuscripts on conceiving sleep stewardship as a clinical, ethical, social, policy, and cultural priority. We invite manuscripts for the October 2024 issue of the AMA Journal of Ethics® on the nature and scope of clinicians-citizens', professions’, health care organizations’, and all of our sleep stewardship responsibilities.
Manuscripts submitted for peer review consideration and inclusion in this issue must follow Instructions for Authors and be submitted by 30 November 2023.
The AMA Journal of Ethics invites original, English-language contributions for peer review consideration on the upcoming themes.