Abstract
Shiftwork – employment outside traditional waking hours – impacts sleep, contributing to circadian disruption and increased risk for numerous poor health outcomes. Young adults are increasingly engaging in shiftwork, therefore requiring tailored, evidence-based sleep resources early in their careers to mitigate sleep and health risks. Despite this need, such resources aren’t readily available for young shiftworkers.
A participatory, co-design approach recruited individuals with lived and/or professional experience in shiftworker sleep to develop resources by participating in two online workshops. Reflexive thematic analysis was applied to workshop transcripts to identify data codes, which were then grouped into themes and populated with information from the current scientific evidence base, allowing for the construction of sleep resources for young shiftworkers.
Co-designers (n=48) stressed the need to support young shiftworkers in prioritising their sleep, as “not doing so comes at a cost, and you often don’t realise that cost until much later”. In addition to prioritisation, analysis identified 33 unique codes, categorised into five overarching themes: sleep science (sleep disorders, circadian rhythms, chronotypes), impacts of poor sleep (health, wellbeing, safety), habits impacting sleep (environment, substances), strategies (fatigue management, napping, stimulus control), and workplace recommendations (education, rostering). Themes were populated with evidence-based content to develop a website, housing comprehensive sleep information; a pictorial infographic, detailing behaviours supportive or detrimental to sleep; and an animated video for resource promotion.
Tailored, evidence-based sleep resources can provide a point of early intervention for young shiftworkers, now requiring formal evaluation to ascertain their impact on knowledge and behaviour change.