2016年CRI Boss Need to Send Employees on Abnormal Shift to Return Home: Expert

"Rise with the lark 1 and go to bed with the lamb"--- This poetic 2 quote is from English poet and novelist Nicholas Breton. Later, it has been used many times as a warning for the necessity to respect people's biological clock. 

Allan Pack is a famous researcher on sleep disorder 3 at the University of Pennsylvania. 

He has recently arrived in Beijing for a sleep medicine forum 4. At the forum, he mentioned employers need to be considerate in transporting their employees on abnormal shift back home when they finish work.

He cited a program particularly targeting medical staff in the US as an example:

"[What] the medical residency programs in the US have done is, one of the real dangers from doctors who I've talked to about that is that drive home in the morning. They've been up forever; they're very, very sleepy. Now they're driving home and they can have crashes when they're driving home. And some of these programs have a lot of shift workers, what they do is they transport them to home."

In addition to medical workers, a number of other occupations also demand people work outside normal hours, including taxi drivers, journalists, security service staff and so on. 

At the end of April this year, the CBS News published a new research finding showing rotating night shift work may take a toll 5 on women's hearts.

The study found that female nurses who had a history of working night shifts in conjunction with daytime shifts had a slightly higher risk of coronary heart disease than those who did not.

In reality, working overnight means a long-time sleep loss in some sense, which may lead to insomnia 6 as well as an increased risk of health problems. And those who work abnormal hours or had done so were found to score lower for memory, speed of processing information and overall brainpower than participants who had never done so.

Evidence given at the forum suggests that people with insomnia have a three-fold risk of developing depression compared with those who sleep well.

This leads Allan Pack to make another proposal for the employer: 

"Some of the issues for the company is what is the right shift, because certain shifts and how you rotate them have bigger effects than others, and there are tools out there, computational tools, that allow you to design the shifts and try to minimize the degree of sleepiness, so that's one thing they could do."

Dr. Pack's clinical expertise 7 is in sleep disorders 8 with a particular focus on diagnosis 9 and management of obstructive sleep apnea. According to the website of Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania,he is internationally recognized for his expertise in this area and has been listed in the Best Doctor's in the United States by the Philadelphia magazine.

He came to Beijing for a two-day forum co-organized by his university and a Center of Excellence 10 in Sleep Medicine with Peking University in the People's Hospital. 

The Center is co-directed by Dr. Fang 11 Han, a professor of Sleep Medicine at PKU and Dr. Allan Pack, Penn's Chief of Sleep Medicine. The professors are both presidents of their respective countries' national sleep research societies.

For Studio Plus, I'm Wang Lei.