Insomnia is the most prevalent sleep disorders and affects 10% of adults worldwide. It has major social and economic consequences. The aim of our study was to evaluate the knowledge of Tunisian general practitioners (GPs) about insomnia.

A cross-sectional survey was carried out during the month of May 2016. Among the 193 GPs randomly selected from different areas of Sfax, in Tunisia, 127 participated to the study. The latter filled a questionnaire including items related to socio-demographic data and clinical features of insomnia.

Among our participants, 58.3% (n = 74) were men and 41.7% (n = 53) women. The average age was 47.91 ± 10.1 years. They have been working for 17.36 ± 10.7 years on average. Seventy-six of GPs had an individual training and a training by attending conferences or by continuous medical education. Most participants (80.3%) thought that they had some lacuna in the management of insomnia. Specific recommendations for the management and treatment of insomnia were known by 7.2% of the GPs. As for theoretical knowledge about insomnia, 74.8% of participants (n = 95) had a high score of correct answers. The latter was correlated to age (P = 0.013) and to the male gender (P = 0.008). However, it was neither correlated to the seniority of the GPs (P = 0.051) nor to the knowledge of specific recommendations for the management of insomnia (P = 0.11).

Our results showed that the GPs had a rather good theoretical knowledge about insomnia. Yet, an improvement of the continuous medical education and a better knowledge of specific recommendations for the management of insomnia are needed.

The authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.