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Employers need guidelines to protect workers from shift work sleep disorder

Written by: David Castillo on June 18th, 2010

Employers need guidelines to protect workers from shift work sleep disorder | read this item

Does your work shift affect your sleeping habits?

Well, according to a new study, it does.

The study will be presented at SLEEP 2010—the 24th annual meeting of American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the Sleep Research. It suggests that day shifts allow workers to get more sleep than night shifts, which are defined as a shift that begins after midnight.

Apart from fewer sleep hours, the study also related the lack of sleep to poorer employee performance. Workers who were better rested were more able to perform their tasks compared to the night shift employees.

“Shifts of equal duration differ in how fatiguing they are depending on the time of day when they are scheduled,” explained Angela Bowen, lead author of the study and research assistant at the Sleep and Performance Research Center at Washington State University Spokane.

She continued: “The same limitation on the number of duty hours may be either overly restrictive if during the day or too liberal if during the night.”

Because of the glaring statistics, experts believe that new labor regulations should be established to guide employers about work hours. This will maximize an employee’s production, while protecting his/her health.

Source: CNN