Night work, split shifts... how can we limit the impact on health?
Direct and visible, the short-term effects associated with these positions are chronic fatigue, a shift from biological and social rhythms. And the long-term impact frequently results in the development of "obesity, hypertension, diabetes, cancer..." With a clear over-exposure to stress, irritability, memory and concentration problems, the psychological sphere is also impacted.
However, the situation is not inevitable. The first lever of prevention lies in finding alternatives to night work. This measure is already effective "in the cleaning sector, which has been encouraging office cleaning during the day for around ten years."
Sometimes this adaptation is sometimes more difficult to implement by the sector of activity. In industry, for example, "night work is sometimes used to make machines profitable by running them full time." Other professional environments cannot "do without continuous human presence." This is the case in the hotel industry, air and maritime transport, or even doctors, nurses, paramedics, nursing assistants, military personnel, police officers, firefighters, and security guards. In these cases, the INRS recommends finding adjustment variables to limit "internal desynchronization and sleep disruption." Concretely, why not "do rotations of two or three nights maximum?" Indeed, "up to three consecutive nights, the biological clock does not have time to go out of sync."
- “Adjust the length of the night shift according to the difficulty of the tasks”
- “Adapt the nature of tasks according to the hours of vigilance (for example, by scheduling the most demanding operations at the start of the night”
- “Insert appropriate breaks, organize sufficient transmission times between teams”
In all cases, prevention also involves raising employee awareness about healthy lifestyle and diet rules: "maintain at least 7 hours of sleep per 24 hours, with naps if necessary, maintain three meals per 24 hours with a snack at night, limit caffeine consumption in the 6 hours before bedtime."
SudOuest
