The effects of shift work on the mental health of NHS Trust employees attending an Occupational Health Department: A cross sectional study
Author: Nwobodo, A
Year: 2019
This study investigated the effects of shift work on the mental health of employees of an NHS Trust attending the Occupational Health Department within a 5-week period.
Eighty Trust employees were invited to participate, of whom 41 fully completed questionnaires on socio-demography, sleep quantity and quality, health and wellbeing, quality of life (QoL-5) and the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ12). Nineteen of these personnel were non-shift workers and twenty-two were shift workers. Questionnaires were analysed with SPSS using descriptive and inferential statistics.
The main finding was that there was no statistically significant difference in subjective complaints of mental health distress reaching the threshold for caseness between the two groups (shift and non-shift workers) based on GHQ12 score (p = 0.326).
Total Quality of Life scores, as percentage, were analysed for the two groups. There was no statistically significant difference in the overall quality of life with mean scores of 57.7% (SD = 16.6) and 61.6% (SD = 15.6) for shift workers and non-shift workers respectively (p = 0.443). However, participants that met the GHQ12 threshold for mental health caseness did report poorer Quality of Life (p = 0.001).
The shift workers reported shorter sleep duration (p = 0.018) and more use of substances to help initiate sleep (p = 0.025), which reflects possible circadian rhythm disturbance. The respondents who met the GHQ12 threshold for mental health caseness reported more use of substances to help initiate sleep (p = 0.026). In addition, there was a positive correlation between the GHQ12 Likert scores and the use of substances to help initiate sleep (rs = 0.439, p = 0.004) which suggests that participants with less pronounced mental health symptoms below the threshold for caseness, also made more use of substances to help initiate sleep.
