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Choosing Wisely Canada: Less Sedatives for Your Older Relatives

Also: Less Sedatives for Your Relatives · Drowsy Without Feeling Lousy (primary care toolkit)

Clinician toolkits for hospitals, long-term care and primary care to stop starting sedative-hypnotics for insomnia in older inpatients and to taper before discharge, combining staff education, order-set changes and a sleep-friendly ward environment. Built on work at Sinai Health System, Toronto. Patient brochures accompany the recommendations.

Years
2017–now
Country
Canada
Topic
Low value carePatient safetySleep
Asks people to
Stop
Strategy
Simple instruction
Channel
Clinical setting
Audience
CliniciansOlder adults
hospital physicians and nurses, primary care, older adults

Evidence

ObservationalPositive

At Sinai Health, new in-hospital sedative-hypnotic prescribing for previously non-users fell from 15.9% to 8.9% (44%) between Sept 2015 and July 2016 (toolkit's own report). CIHI/CWC national monitoring lists chronic benzodiazepine use among measures that improved. In a waiting-room test, CWC brochures improved knowledge about sedative-hypnotics for only 40% of readers.

Sponsor (who paid)

  • Choosing Wisely Canada NGO
  • Health Quality Ontario (Choosing Wisely Ontario change packages) State local government

Credits (who made it)

Not recorded yet.

Related campaigns

Sources

  1. Less Sedatives for Your Relatives (toolkit) sponsor
  2. CWC BSH Hospital Toolkit v1.3 sponsor · 2017
  3. Overuse of Tests and Treatments: Has Canada Made Progress? evaluation · 2023 · DOI 10.12927/hcq.2023.27024 · PMID 36826234
  4. A survey of primary care patients' readiness to engage in the de-adoption practices recommended by Choosing Wisely Canada evaluation · 2016 · DOI 10.1186/s13104-016-2103-6 · PMID 27286651

Research notes

Created 2026-10-23 from the sleep campaign literature search (PubMed and web search; OpenAlex was unreachable), see docs/sleep-campaigns-literature.md. Findings are paraphrased from abstracts, not full texts; official URLs come from search results and were not opened.

Record cases/choosing-wisely-canada-less-sedatives.json, updated 2026-10-23· Link to this campaign