FATIGUE: THE SILENT EPIDEMIC

Fatigue can cause lost productivity and accidents. This problem affects nearly 40 percent of U.S. workers from time to time, according to a study published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine.

Fatigued workers lose an average of 5.6 work hours per week, compared to 3.3 hours for those without fatigue. Even when working, workers with fatigue symptoms had much lower rates of productivity than their sprightly counterparts – mainly due to low concentration and increased time needed to accomplish tasks.

Perhaps more importantly, fatigue can lead to accidents. Clockwork Consultants, a UK-based company that helps enterprises manage fatigue risk, reports that fatigued employees are three times more likely to have an accident at work.

How Fatigue Affects Safety

Why are fatigued employees more likely to be involved in accidents? An article in the New York Times described a sleep restriction study at the Sleep and Chronobiology Laboratory at the Hospital at University of Pennsylvania. Researchers measured subjects' attentiveness while performing a repetitive task. Subjects who had eight hours of sleep nightly over the 14-day study performed well, with hardly any attention lapses or cognitive declines. In subjects who had four or six hours of sleep nightly, performance declined steadily over the course of the study. Members of both groups did steadily worse on memory tests as the study progressed, and a significant number of even those who had gotten six hours of sleep nightly were falling asleep on task.

The conclusion? Individuals vary in their tolerance to sleeplessness, but workers who consistently get less than eight hours of sound sleep per night could be working at less than peak attention and therefore be more accident-prone.

Fighting the Fatigue Factor

Many safety-critical occupations have strict rules about how long a worker can stay on the job and how long breaks must be. Productivity experts recommend similar guidelines for most jobs. If extended hours/ overtime are common, managers should calculate the time required for the commute home, meal preparation, eating and socializing with family when calculating employees' work shifts. Workplaces may also provide on-site accommodations, prepared meals for workers and facilities where employees can take a nap when they are tired.

Proper working conditions can also reduce the risk of fatigue. Fatigue is increased by dim lighting or other limited visual conditions (e.g., due to weather), high temperatures, high noise, high comfort, tasks that must be sustained for long periods of time, and monotonous work tasks. Eliminating such conditions and providing environments that have good lighting, comfortable temperatures and reasonable noise levels quickly pay for themselves in reduced risk, according to a study by the Canadian Centre of Occupational Health and Safety (COHS). If possible, work tasks should also provide a variety of interest and tasks should change throughout the shift.

Organizations should adopt a variety of methods to make themselves "fatigue safe." The most common include:

-Training workers to help them understand their personal levels of fatigue

-Developing "fatigue safe" work schedules that comply with applicable regulations

-Developing fatigue risk management policies and procedures

-Using fatigue models to investigate fatigue-related accidents

-Appointing committees to oversee fatigue management programs.

For more suggestions on reducing fatigue-related accidents in the workplace, please contact the PCOC Insurance Program department of Jenkins Insurance Services at (877) 860-7378 or, email us @ ProPest@Leavitt.com.

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