Longer working hours highlight fatigue issues

This month, the Health Services Union will negotiate with the New South Wales state Ambulance Service over rosters for certain regional paramedics, with fatigue as a major issue. Earlier in the year, the Industrial Relations Commission approved an agreement to remove rosters that, the union said, required paramedics to be on call for 16 hours at a time, 7 days a week.

“With Australians now working more hours because of job security concerns, fatigue management at work is becoming a more important issue,” says Elizabeth Shannon from sleep and fatigue management company Sleep Less No More. “It translates to the bottom line in a myriad of ways such as errors, bad decisions, frayed tempers, memory lapses and increased absenteeism.”

Shannon says productivity and brain function problems fall into two broad areas, which can overlap: fatigue (slowing down of performance, which includes errors and accidents) and sleepiness (which relates to the individual’s daily natural sleep-wake circadian rhythm and the amount of sleep they are getting).

“Psychological fatigue is caused when relentlessly doing the same task (such as driving a vehicle or placing trade transactions) eventually fatigues the neural networks and causes impairments such as crashing a car or making an error in the transaction amount. Fatigue is complicated by emotional stress such as anxiety, exhausted adrenals, trauma, urgency, negative thoughts, over-stimulating and challenging environments, even extreme temperatures and noise,” says Shannon.

“The ‘sleepiness’ issue is compounded by anything that prevents people from sleeping properly at night such as inappropriate nutrition, lack of exercise, medical problems, age and some medications. If you get really sleepy, the body can suddenly and involuntarily just put you to sleep. The workers most at risk of falling asleep are shift-workers, frequent flyers crossing time zones and all workers that work in hours of darkness.”

According to Dr Charles Czeisler of Harvard Medical School, 70% of people say they frequently don’t get enough sleep, with 30% saying they don’t get enough sleep every single night.

Shannon has provided the following four cost-effective fatigue guidelines to help workplaces:

1. Capitalise on the light entering windows by placing desks nearby. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine showed that workers who accessed an extra 173 minutes of light slept on average another 46 minutes at night.
2. No member of staff should operate equipment and/or dangerous machinery, or drive a vehicle if they have been awake for 14 hours straight.
3. Napping for periods of up to 20 minutes is allowed at work and should be encouraged for shift-workers and all staff members who are working after midnight.
4. No member of staff should catch a red-eye flight and then drive a car, under any circumstances.