NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – When the clock "springs forward" an hour for Daylight Saving Time, on-the-job injuries may follow, according to a new study in the Journal of Applied Psychology.
"On that day when you lose an hour of clock time, people lose about 40 minutes of sleep," said Dr. Christopher M. Barnes, who conducted the research with Dr. David T. Wagner while both were PhD students at Michigan State University in East Lansing. "That lost sleep seems to increase their risk for injury."
Daylight Saving Time-now observed by 74 countries around the world-could have an effect on worker safety, Barnes and Wagner note in their report, given the potential for lost sleep. But evidence on its effects on accidents in general, they add, has been mixed.
To get a better sense of how these changes might influence the risk of injury on the job, they looked at data from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health for mining injuries from 1983 to 2006.
On Mondays after the switch to Daylight Saving Time, they found, there were an average of 3.6 more injuries compared to other days, a 5.7% increase. Injuries on these days led to 2,649 more days of work lost per year, compared to injuries that didn't happen after the time shift, representing an approximately 68% increase. But switching back from Daylight Saving Time to Standard Time and gaining an hour didn't affect injury frequency or severity.
In the second part of the study, the researchers analyzed data for 2004 to 2006 from the American Time Use Survey, in which people report their activity minute-by-minute for the previous day. They looked at the 14,310 interviews of working people to examine whether Daylight Saving Time influenced how much they slept.
On average, after losing an hour, people slept 40 minutes less, the researchers found. But gaining an hour had no effect on sleep duration.
The advantage of studying miners, noted Barnes, is that they always work in artificial light, so changes in the duration of daylight don't affect them at the workplace. "It was a nice way to conduct a little bit cleaner science than what has been done in the past," Barnes, who is now at the US Military Academy at West Point, told Reuters Health.
Barnes said he and Wagner, now at Singapore Management University, don't suggest getting rid of Daylight Saving Time, because it has important advantages. Nevertheless, Barnes added, it's important, at the very least, to let workers know of the possible increased injury risk following the time shift.
"If we just let these workers face the extended risk without even telling them that that's going on, I think that's sort of an unethical way to proceed," he said.
Barnes and Wagner suggest a few ways to cope with the change: Start work a half-hour later for a couple of days after the move to Daylight Saving Time, or have more safety monitors on the job on those days.
It might also make sense to avoid scheduling particularly dangerous or demanding tasks for these days, Barnes added. "If you have that flexibility to bump a certain task by a single day, that might help prevent some pretty important accidents and injuries and other sorts of problems."
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