Summary

In organizations that operate continuously, such as emergency services, a number of organizational and individual factors contribute to physical and mental fatigue among workers. Night work and rotating shift work significantly disrupt sleeping and waking patterns. In turn, this increases loss of performance, errors, employment incidents and accidents, in addition to reducing productivity and damaging workers’ health. This research study is a joint initiative with the objective of providing the police departments in the study with scientifically validated tools to manage fatigue. These tools will enable them to reduce the risk of employment incidents and accidents associated with fatigue.

This research arises from interest expressed jointly by the employer and union representatives of police departments that wish to better manage fatigue and its impacts on their organizations. The study’s goal is to develop the core component of a fatigue risk management system (FRMS). This component is based on scientific data and consists of a fatigue risk prediction tool specific to the police departments participating in this study. Several steps were required to fulfill this objective. First, the departments that were interested were identified and approached to explain the project, its objectives, and to agree on a timeframe. Two police departments were selected.

After an introductory meeting with the employer and union representatives of these police departments, local operational committees were set up and discussion groups were organized. These groups brought together police officers, human resource representatives and occupational health and safety representatives. The aim was to gather the participants’ comments about the problem of work fatigue. The participants were encouraged to describe their experiences with fatigue at work, how and in what types of situations it is expressed and what factors affect its occurrence. Subsequently, the suggestions from these groups were considered in the development of a large field study, in which a total of 76 full-time police patrol officers aged 20 to 65 and in good health were studied.

Each police officer recruited was monitored for a complete work cycle (~1 month) in order to quantify their fatigue levels and the contributing factors. For the entire duration of the study, the participants wore a small watch (an actigraph) on their nondominant wrist to record their sleep patterns. They also made several daily entries into a mobile phone to record their sleep periods, levels of fatigue, alertness and sleepiness, and to complete validated performance tests. The workload and consumption of energy drinks were taken into account. Four or five times during the study, the participants collected urine samples for more than 24 consecutive hours. The purpose of these collections was to measure the content of hormonal metabolites useful for assessing the time of their internal biological clocks. The results were analyzed to determine the factors that affected fatigue levels. Various personal and operational factors, such as those related to the organization of the sleep-wake cycle and the work schedule, were considered.

This study demonstrated that fatigue varies according to the hours worked and the time of day. It is more pronounced at night than during the day. It is also more pronounced at the beginning of the day shift and at the end of the night shift. Fatigue and performance variables are also depend on the police department studied. This observation underscores the importance of collecting specific data for each organization in order to properly quantify the problem of fatigue management within that organization. The results of this field study were used to develop a tool to assess the risks associated with fatigue at work. With these results, the influence of various factors that contribute to work fatigue risks could be measured. The tool developed made it possible for fatigue-related risks to be categorized into four levels: low, moderate, high and very high.

It is expected that this risk-assessment grid for work-related fatigue will enable organizations to adopt policies to manage these risks. One anticipated outcome of the research is an FRMS. Moreover, it will be possible to use the data from this research for further knowledge transfer activities, such as training modules on fatigue management at work for police officers. Finally, this initiative will be easily adaptable to other groups of workers dealing with similar problems.