Observational analysis reveals impacts of shiftwork on mental health and cardiovascular risks in firefighters, suggesting new scheduling may enhance well-being.
Introduction: Firefighters often face disrupted sleep, increasing their risk of accidents, cardiovascular disease, cancer, and mental health issues. They also struggle to balance family and social obligations with the need for sleep during days off. To address this conflict, many U.S. firefighter departments have shifted from a 24/48 schedule to schedules that provide additional consecutive days off-shift such as the 48/96 or the 24/72/48/72 schedules. To guide decisions around work schedules while prioritizing firefighter health, well-being, and safety, we aimed to systematically assess the impact of work schedules on these outcomes and develop effective methods for widely disseminating our findings via the SWIFT (Shift work in firefighters) study, a Total Worker Health (TWH) initiative.
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Costa-Black et al. (2025) studied this question.
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