![]() ![]() ![]() Among eldercare workers, involvement in the planning of work schedules did not influence health and well-being measures. Findings support the potential health and well-being effects of self-rostering to some extent. To date, self-rostering interventions aimed at improving WTC have been predominantly studied in healthcare or related fields. The findings suggested that at least modest changes toward more ergonomic shift schedules can be achieved by using the shift schedule evaluation tool including recommendations for better shift ergonomics. Our recent study showed that the use of shift schedule evaluation tools was associated with improvements in many, but unfavorable changes in some working hour characteristics. Regardless of the individual preferences of shift workers, safer and healthier schedules can be achieved by focusing on the ergonomics of the scheduled shifts. To avoid these adverse effects, fewer consecutive night shifts, sufficient recovery periods between shifts, and shorter night shifts, for example, have been reported as ways to optimize sleep and reduce fatigue and related problems such as health impairments or accidents. The impaired ergonomics of irregular working hours in shift work, and potentially harmful working hour characteristics pose health and safety risks to employees. ![]() One way to promote employees’ health when working irregular hours is to minimize the occurrence of shift characteristics known to be associated with impaired health and safety. The findings on shift work and health, particularly in the healthcare sector, underline the importance of taking into account the total duration of exposure to shift work when examining the link between shift work, working time characteristics, and sickness absence. Other studies on nurses have found that it is not only shift work that affects health, but rather how shift work is organized in terms of weekly hours, irregular schedules, and length of recovery periods. Besides selection or individual preferences, a study from Finnish healthcare found that there is no association between longer working hours and the risk of sickness absence in the short exposure time of 10 to 30 days, and the risk is lower on exposure of 40 days or more, suggesting that the exposure time window plays an important role in the potential health effects of long working hours. To conclude, participatory shift scheduling increased some potentially harmful working hour characteristics but its effects on sickness absence were negligible, and further attenuated by using the shift schedule evaluation tool.Įvidence from a systematic review on nurses suggests that the health problems associated with shift work are mediated by at least chronotype and sex. Using the shift schedule evaluation tool with the participatory shift scheduling tool attenuated the adverse effects. An average increase of 0.5 episodes on all sickness absence episodes was observed for the third year. Increased effects were observed: 0.2 days for the second, and 0.8 for the third year after the onset of intervention. Using participatory scheduling tool increased long working hours and weekend work and had delayed effects on the short (1–3 days) sickness absences. Difference-in-differences regression with ward-level clustered standard errors was used to estimate the average treatment effect on the treated coefficients relative to timing of the intervention with 95% confidence intervals (CI). We utilized a panel data for 2015−2019 with 16,557 hospital employees (6143 in the intervention and 10,345 in the control group). We investigated the effects of using participatory shift scheduling and shift schedule evaluation tools on working hour characteristics and sickness absence. Participatory shift scheduling for irregular working hours can influence shift schedules and sickness absence. ![]()
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