Self–reported health and well-being amongst night security guards: a comparison with the working population

Abstract

The present study sought to relate the well-being of night workers to that of the working population in general. One hundred and ninety-seven male permanent night security guards were interviewed with regard to the occurrence of various symptoms during the previous 12-month period. The results were compared with the results from similar interviews with a representative national sample of males (n = 1769) in the Swedish workforce. An age standardized morbidity ratio was computed with control for various background variables. The results showed that the security guards had a 2-3 times higher occurrence of sleep disturbances and fatigue than the national sample. Among the variables not differing from the national sample were gastrointestinal problems, headache, nervous problems, depression, nausea, diarrhoea, and haemorrhoids. It was concluded that sleep/wake disturbances are considerably more usual in permanent night security guards than in the working population as a whole.

Gastrointestinal disorders among shift workers

“…Also, a lack of control of social class could be misleading, since educational level and income could differentiate between shift and day workers. Only three studies have controlled for social class (17,30,36), and, while others are restricted to a single factory or occupation, day workers may more often have been skilled than shift workers.…”

“…Alfredsson et al (17) studied GI symptoms among Swedish, male night-security guards (N=197 The results were adjusted for marital status, smoking, socioeconomic group, and full-time, hectic, and monotonous work. A weakness of the study was that the national survey, which was used as the control population, was done in 1980, and the data collection among the guards many years later.…”

The Kind of Mental Health Problems and it Association with Aggressiveness: A Study on Security Guards

“…In addition, stress was also high among the participant, which is significant to the literature that suggested high stress level often seen among security guard [29]. Profession as security guard deal with a lot of stress due to the needs of the job, such as shift work [19][20], working pattern which followed the same pattern everyday [23], and most importantly, responsibility to ensure that the job is safely done while constantly being exposed to incident [17] [21]. In aggression, hostility was identified as the most common form of aggressive behavior among the security guards, follo wed by physical and verbal aggression.…”

“…Security guard is one of the occupations with high risk to get involve in incident at work such as violence and crime, which consequently affect their well-being [17]. This is due to the needs to interact with various people during working [18] as well as working pattern which often follows shift working hour rather than fixed working hour [19][20].…”

Repercussões de uma intervenção nutricional na sonolência de trabalhadores noturnos

“…Em uma pesquisa realizada com guardas de segurança privada, foi observado que estes profissionais tiveram um aumento de duas a três vezes no relato da ocorrência de distúrbios de sono e sonolência, fadiga e problemas do sistema nervoso, quando comparados com a população trabalhadora em geral (ALFREDSSON et al,1991).…”