In conclusion, all shift workers display a worsening of sleepiness, perceived fatigue and psychomotor vigilance associated with the night shift, but those on a counter-clockwise shift experience an amplification of these negative consequences. "We hypothesised", says Luigi De Gennaro of the Department of Psychology of Sapienza, group coordinator, "that backward-rotating shift (BRS) was associated with increased fatigue and sleepiness and, above all, with reduced behavioural measures of sustained attention."Ĭonsistent with this hypothesis, the study demonstrated a significant worsening in all dimensions measured in nurses working a counter-clockwise shift. A subsequent study showed that in nurses, poor sleep quality, to which all shift workers are exposed, further impairs psychomotor performance at night. This is not the first work by this research group, which, under the leadership of Luigi De Gennaro of Sapienza University of Rome, has been studying the consequences of shift work on Italian nurses for years.Ī first study showed that night shifts are associated with increased sleepiness and fatigue, as well as significant reductions in performance on psychomotor vigilance tasks. To do this, the researchers took into account the sleepiness and fatigue perceived at the end of a shift while measuring the psychomotor performance of the health workers. In other words, they wanted to clarify what is widespread implicit knowledge but which lacks experimental support. In particular, the researchers wanted to ascertain whether nurses who work shifts with an anti-clockwise rotation (afternoon-morning-night) suffer worse consequences than those who work shifts with a clockwise regime (morning-afternoon-night). The study involved 144 nurses from 5 hospitals in Central and Southern Italy, monitored from July 2017 to February 2020. New research, published in the journal JAMA Network Open and coordinated by the Department of Psychology of Sapienza, in collaboration with Santa Lucia IRCCS in Rome and the University of L'Aquila, studied for the first time in Italy the effects of shift work on Italian nurses based on clockwise or anti-clockwise shift rotation.
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