Canadian HR Reporter

CANADIAN HR REPORTER CANADIAN HR REPORTER April 21, 2014 April 21, 2014 NEWS NEWS 7 Canada's prestigious fourth annual health and safety awards — Canada's Safest Employers — have launched a new category to recognize employers for best practices and leading initiatives in workplace mental health. To nominate your organization visit www.safestemployers.com for details. Nominations close June 2, 2014 Mental health problems will cost businesses $198 billion in lost productivity over the next 30 years, predicts The Mental Health Commission of Canada. To recognize employers that are leaders in addressing psychological issues in the workplace, Canadian Occupational Safety has launched the Canada's Safest Employers Psychological Safety Award. Centre for Mental Health in the Workplace Great-West Life www.workplacestrategiesformentalhealth.com Presented by National Founding Sponsor & Title Sponsor Psychological Safety Sponsor Is your organization a leader in workplace mental health? the sleep cycle because chronic sleep loss can have lasting eff ects on the brain, said Veasey, who co-authored the study. Previous studies on humans have suggested chronic sleep loss has a lasting im- pact on attention, she said. "So we sought to look for the cells in the brain (that) are neces- sary for maintaining that perfect attention," said Veasey, adding that these are called the locus coe- ruleus (LC) neurons. "Every time you need to be alert and pay attention to something, these are the cells that play a criti- cal role. And what we found was that mice that were subjected to just one week of a shift worker's schedule of staying awake for eight hours when they normally would be asleep, that was suffi - cient to cause loss of the cells and injury to the remaining cells." is suggests that sleeping in on the weekend isn't enough to help the brain recover from re- peated sleep deprivation. " e concept is that the brain takes much longer — if it does recover, the recovery process is much longer than we had envi- sioned," said Veasey. "It's not going to have a major impact on someone's cognition in general. e little things where it does play a role… (is) in mood. So people would be expected to be less interested in activities, and it may shift someone who's pre- disposed to depression over to depression." It may also impair a person's at- tention span, said Veasey — which has huge safety implications for many shift workers. Increased injury risk Workplace injuries account for about 25 per cent of all injuries working-age adults experience in Canada, according to Cameron Mustard, president of the Institute for Work & Health in Toronto. And the risk of a workplace injury is higher for those who do shift work, he said. " e (study) we've completed recently did fi nd, for both men and women, that working eve- nings, nights, does carry with it an elevated risk of work injury," said Mustard. "Of all the work injuries expe- rienced by women, about 12 per cent are due to the higher risk that is present in working evenings or nights… For men, the proportion is about six per cent." While their research has not yet been able to clearly determine why this is the case, two factors around sleep disruption are likely at play — sleepiness and fatigue, he said. " e sleepiness idea is even if you're well-rested, if you're awake at midnight, your body is trying to go to sleep. It's your circadian rhythm. And there are many things that the body can habitu- ate to… But it's one of the more vigorous hormones in the human body. Your body really wants to go to sleep when night falls," said Mustard. "Related to sleepiness is fatigue. So if you're not well-rested — which is going to be increasingly a risk if you're working late into the night — you're going to be in- creasingly fatigued." However, the risks inherent in shift work are still largely "invis- ible," he said — under-researched and not well-understood. at's a major problem when one-quarter of the country's population is en- gaging in some form of shift work. "About 25 per cent of Canadian workers will do some hours in their work week other than 9-to- 5, Monday to Friday. And that's a big number," said Mustard. "So these are police offi cers, these are nurses, these are truck drivers — it's quite a wide range of occupations that have within them either the expectation or the possibility that people will be working other than 9-to-5, Mon- day to Friday." Other health concerns Neuron damage and increased risk of injury are not the only concerns around shift work and chronic sleep disturbance. Shift work is classifi ed by the International Agency for Re- search on Cancer (IARC) as a "probable human carcinogen," said Amy Hall, occupational hygienist at CAREX Canada in Vancouver. "Shift work was (designated) 'probable' because there was quite strong experimental evidence and evidence in animals, but in terms of human studies, there was sort of a limited amount of evidence that indicated that breast cancer was an outcome of a lot of shift work — we're talking decades," she said. "In terms of health eff ects, there is strong evidence for some things, and there's other areas where evi- dence is developing." ere is fairly strong evidence shift work results in sleep disor- ders and higher rates of workplace injury. There's also developing evi- dence shift work may be linked with heart disease, mental health, gastrointestinal problems and certain other types of cancer — most notably prostate cancer, said Hall. But more research is desper- ately needed. " e problem is that because there are so many definitions of shift work and it is a new and evolving area, the research, the evidence still needs development," she said. "(And) we need more re- search into the types of strategies that are most eff ective in reducing health eff ects." More research is what Veasey plans to do. While her initial study used mice to study neuron dam- age, she's planning to move on to working with humans. "We'd like to examine post- mortem shift worker brains and then follow shift workers. And then there also will be some in- lab shift worker studies looking at when do patients really recover from their sleep loss — how long does it take?" she asked. "If you did a week with three or four all-nighters, when does your function really, truly return to normal?" It's research that's even more pressing given the large number of people who are aff ected. " is is incredibly pervasive… (it) aff ects a lot of people," said Veasey. "It's that paradox where you feel like you need to skip your sleep to work harder to get that upward edge in life, and you may be actually cutting short that edge if you're really harming the brain." Sleepiness, fatigue possible reasons for injuries Sleepiness, fatigue possible reasons for injuries SHIFT WORK < pg. 1 The risks inherent in shift work are largely invisible — under-researched and not well-understood. That's a major problem when so many people are shift workers.

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