Fatigue in the workplace
Did you know that one third of adults experience fatigue-related symptoms caused by inadequate sleep?
In fact, extreme fatigue can have a similar impact on a person’s brain as a blood alcohol reading of 0.05%.
AusHealth has developed a small number of tried-and-tested services that measure a person’s level of fatigue. These assessments can identify necessary holes in company policy, or recommend treatment to an employee.
This kind of testing can be especially important in a high-risk workplaces (including 24-hour operations, including shift work, on-call duty cycles, call outs and incident response), or for organisations wanting to boost team productivity.
The Awaken Workplace App
Awaken gives companies clear line-of-sight of how well fatigue is being managed, and where any major threats exist. Awaken empowers individuals to monitor and manage their own risk, prompting them to implement approved management strategies when they enter moderate or high risk zones.
Awaken puts a strong focus on employee health and wellbeing, with direct positive impact on safety and productivity.
- 32% of Australians are sleeping less than 6 hours per night
- 76% of those who sleep less than 6 hours a night report frequent impairment
- 17% of workers are reporting falling asleep at work.
Some workers are at a higher risk of fatigue because their work typically involves some or all of the factors which contribute to fatigue, for example:
- Shift workers
- Night workers
- Fly-in, fly-out workers (FIFO)
- Drive in, drive out workers (DIDO)
- Seasonal workers
- On-call and call-back workers
- Emergency service workers
- Medical professionals and other health workers
- Any worker performing safety critical tasks.
It is particularly important to identify fatigue risks which might arise when safety critical tasks are being carried out. Safety critical tasks are those where the consequences of a mistake or error in judgment could cause serious injury, for example:
- Driving a road vehicle, such as a taxi or courier van, or operating a crane or other high risk plant
- Working at heights
- Participating in medical or surgical procedures and settings
- Working with flammable or explosive substances
- Other types of work identified as hazardous, for example electrical work.
Awaken has had extensive live trials within local government and large utilities industries to make it the best workplace fatigue management system on the market.
Companies from the following industries are about to adopt Awaken as their workplace fatigue management system:
- Utilities gas, electricity and water including oil, gas and energy
- Transport, Postal and Warehousing including aviation, rail, road and logistics
- Building and construction
- Health care and social assistance including emergency services, hospital staff
- Agriculture, Forestry and Fishing including marine, shipping
- Mining and mining services.
AusHealth has developed the Awaken app to help companies manage fatigue. It has a simple interface, and collects data to alert individuals to potential impairment, and help companies understand their risk. The app allows workers to input information about the number of hours they have worked and their sleep data, gathered through biometric data (wearing a Fitbit), and symptom data.
Based on work hour, sleep and symptom data, the app will assess personal ‘fatigue risk level’ as green, amber or red risk, and prompt them to implement appropriate management strategies.
The app can be prompted to alert supervisors of increased risk levels for high-risk workers, to allow an additional level of intervention and accountability.
A reaction time test has also been included to test for potential impairment. This is particularly useful when base lining fatigue-risk, or comparing between different roster options.
Find Awaken on the iOS App Store.
