MENTAL HEALTH & STRESS
SLEEP MATTERS
As employers, are we recognising the importance of ‘sleep’ as a serious health and safety factor? Joanne Hunter, Head of Marketing at ProtectHear, looks at some of the research.
Sleeping well is vital to our wellbeing, improves both our physical and mental health, and boosts our immune system, which in these unprecedented times is a must for all. Many of us that enjoy the luxury of eight hours quality sleep most nights, tend to take it for granted. However, according to The Sleep Council, in Great Britain 30% of us, on the whole, do not sleep well for a variety of reasons.
Research highlighted by the NHS suggests that getting less than six hours of sleep each night could potentially triple a person’s risk of dying from heart disease or cancer, and links between lack of sleep and diabetes are well documented. However, sleep deprivation poses a much more immediate and daily threat for the industrial workers amongst us who earn a living working in hazardous environments.
Sleep deprivation can lead to fatigue, which is extreme and overwhelming tiredness, and can literally be a matter of life or death for workers in factories, industrial plants and other harsh work sites. Fatigue reduces a person’s energy to such a level that a significant amount of increased effort is required by that person to enable them to perform even the most routine, every-day tasks effectively. It will cloud a worker’s thinking, lead to errors of judgement, and cause reactions to be far slower than usual. Fatigue can make us very unsafe, as when excessively tired we can often misjudge our own state of mind and abilities, believing we can handle important decisions and tasks well, when in fact we cannot.
HSE statistics show that in the UK, 147 workers suffered fatal injuries during 2018/19 and 600,000 non-fatal injuries were reported in the same period. Fatigue has been highlighted as a root cause for several of the most publicised major accidents of all time – for
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example, the capsizing of the Herald of Free Enterprise, the Chernobyl disaster and Clapham Junction rail crash. Fatigue is also implicated in 20% of our accidents on major roads. As employers, there is much we can do to reduce fatigue amongst our workforce:
CONSULT BUT TAKE CONTROL Fatigue is as serious as any other hazard in the
workplace, and it warrants its own policy that deals with matters such as shift design, adequate breaks and rules about shift swapping. Employees should be consulted about their shift patterns, but as employers we must bear in mind employees may volunteer or request working arrangements that are unhealthy and likely to cause fatigue because of every-day, outside pressures such as the need to earn extra money, or please others at work or at home. An employer has a duty of care to ensure its workers remain safe, and must lead the way when it comes to tackling fatigue.
MONITOR AND ENFORCE The regular monitoring and record keeping of your
employee’s fatigue is essential as the state and health of your employees will of course change on a daily basis. The Health & Safety Executive (HSE) provides a tool for measuring fatigue – its Fatigue Risk Index which is available online as a spreadsheet.
The tool was originally developed as a method of assessing the risk arising from fatigue associated with work patterns for safety critical workers. The tool uses two indices to arrive at its score – one measures fatigue and follows a nine-point scale ranging from one (extremely alert) to nine (extremely sleepy – fighting sleep). The other measures the relative risk of the occurrence of an incident on a particular shift – a level one represents the average risk on a 12-hour shift, and a value of two represents double the risk. The tool is
www.tomorrowshs.com
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