Health care work

Health care work involves high cognitive demands and requires high alertness and concentration levels for a correct assessment and decision making. Sleepiness, sleep deprivation, and vigilance fluctuations, connected to irregular and prolonged working hours, are key factors in conditioning human error, hence accidents and injuries related to both workers and patients. Several studies reported that both physicians and nurses, working on shift and night work and for prolonged duty periods, show significant negative effects on cognitive behavior and psychomotor performance with increased risk of clinical errors such as to hinder patients' safety and health. In order to prevent such adverse consequences and improve workers' well-being and performance efficiency, company management has the hard task of optimizing work organization by acting on working time, available staff and working procedures. In recent years, many attempts have been made by medical associations, governmental institutions, and international directives to set limits to weekly working hours, overtime, length of duty periods, and rest periods of health care personnel, as well as to adopt appropriate compensative measures able to counteract sleep deprivation and sleepiness, in particular as concerns sleep hygiene, napping, use of bright light and medicaments