PIPELINE SUMMER 2014 | 25

PETROLEUM SAFETY CONFERENCE | SHOWS

Making a minor change to a worker’s sleep opportunity could result in big safety dividends, suggests Pat Byrne, vice-president and founder of Fatigue Science, a fatigue-related risk manage-ment company in Vancouver.

Byrne hosted a session entitled Mitigate Risk Associated with Fatigue at the Petroleum Safety Conference (PSC) in Banff, Alta. on May 7. In the session, Byrne said that managing fatigue risk takes three factors into account: sleep opportunity (is the work schedule designed so that workers have the right opportunity for sleep?); sleep obtained (taking into account sleep disorders and work-related and environmental factors, such as shift work and jet lag); and self-imposed factors (such as stress, little children at home, etc.).

He used the example of a shift worker who worked from 6 a.m. to 5 p.m., spending about 68 per cent of his time in an impaired state in terms of his ability to react. “That’s because he’s starting at 6 a.m., so he has to get up at 3,” Byrne says. “If you change his schedule to give him one hour of sleep at night, you can reduce that from 68 per cent to 23 per cent, just by changing that shift by one hour.”

Erin Kelly, communications specialist with Fatigue Science, used a case study involving an oilsands employee who worked 11-hour shifts for 14 days straight. Using the company’s Readiband technology — a wrist-worn device that automatically detects a wearer’s sleep and wake periods and characterizes the quantity and quality of sleep — the organization was able to demonstrate that the mechanic “was spending almost 70 per cent of his work day in a fatigue-impaired state, equivalent to having 0.08 [blood alco-hol content] or more.

“Using the technology, we were not only able to identify the extent of his fatigue, but its source, as we could see quite objectively how his long work shifts and commute were limiting his daily sleep opportunity and that the 14-day schedule provided him no opportunity to recover during his rotation,” she says. “The moral of the story with the oilsands worker was that we were really easily able to iden-tify a few small changes that could be implemented, which would drastically improve the worker’s on-the-job safety score.”

In his presentation, Byrne pointed out that alert-ness and cognitive performance at any given moment are based on sleep history (within about the last week) and the time of day (circadian rhythm). “So what you’re looking at is the actual change in reaction time and the ability to concentrate over a 24-hour period,” he says. “Your reaction time is slower when you’re tired, and that’s measurable. We know people

perform better with eight hours [of sleep] than they do with seven, and we know they can perform better with 10 than eight.”

In the oil and gas industry specifically, Byrne sug-gests that millions of dollars have been spent trying to educate workers about fatigue, but it has had very little behavioural change. “You have to start some-where,” he says. “If you know your workers are not sleeping because they have a sleep disorder, then you can get that looked at. If they have lifestyle issues, you can talk to them, you can look at their sleep environment.”

The Readiband is a wrist-worn device that automatically detects a wearer’s sleep and wake periods and charac-terizes the quantity and quality of sleep. If a score is encroaching on 70 per cent, the wearer is considered fatigue-impaired.