Four hours of sleep, ice cream for dinner and a caffeine 'addiction': Brutal reality behind rotating shift work in Australia

Exclusive: When Jarrod Wolhuter would lay his head to rest after a chaotic night shift as a critical care nurse, he'd barely get four hours of uninterrupted sleep.

That very evening, he'd drag himself out the door, provide life-saving care for patients for eight hours straight, barely eat a square meal, and then do it all again the next night.

The Sydney dad was left in a constant state of exhaustion. Then after a decade on the front line, he left night shift work behind six months ago.

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"You'd finish a night shift, you'd have a sleep day, and then the expectation would be that you'd have to start at 6am the following day," Wolhuter told Nine.com.au.

"It's a pretty brutal roster, and it totally messes with your sleep cycle."

Wolhuter said his diet suffered, particularly during the transition from night to day shifts, sometimes having just a bowl of ice cream for a meal.

"I was irritable and just seeking comfort food, craving that sugar high," he said.

"It's really difficult to stay healthy, and most of the food that circulates around the hospital is chocolate or very heavy in sugar too."

An estimated 1.1 million Australians, around 16 per cent of the working population, work while the rest of the country sleeps.

Nearly half of these workers are on regularly-changing rosters, including overnight, afternoon and morning shifts.

The dangerous metabolic health impact of rotating rosters has been laid bare in a first-of-its-kind research conducted in Australia.

Swinburne Dietetics Lecturer and lead author Dr Angela Clark studied the weekly diets of 250 fixed shift workers and rotating roster workers, including paramedics, firefighters and call centre operators.

Alongside other researchers at Monash University and Adelaide University, Clark discovered that staff who regularly moved from day to night shift consumed far more calories, salt and alcohol than their regular shift counterparts.

This led to a higher risk of heart disease, Type 2 diabetes and obesity.

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"An irregular schedule had an impact on what shift workers ate," Clark told this masthead.

"We found that in rotating shift workers, they had even higher calories, more alcohol in their diet.

"Eating regularly is really difficult for one thing, because you don't know if you're waking up at 6pm: is that breakfast or is that dinner?"

Clark said an inconsistent roster had a far bigger impact on the existing health risks of shift work than she originally thought.

Shift work is known to increase the risk of insulin resistance and lowered glucose and lipid tolerance, which are factors associated with risk of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

"Eating at night is particularly problematic, and may contribute to these increased health risks and unexpected weight gain," she said.

"We can see some changes happening already in unintentional weight gain and increased waist circumference, even a couple of years into rotating shift work," she added

Disrupted sleep imposed by shift work has also been linked to a higher prevalence of obesity and type 2 diabetes.

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NSW Nurses and Midwives' Association member and emergency department nurse Monique Murray is often in the middle of the night shift blues.

The mother-of-two said she regularly operated on just a few hours of sleep.

"As nurses, we might be working on four hours of sleep and then having to live a life and then go back to work that night," Murray said.

"And your eating habits are completely changed.

"Who wants to sit down and eat a big meal at one o'clock in the morning? But your body's craving nutrients, because you're working and you're burning all that energy."

If Murray didn't take her own food to work, she wouldn't "survive" the shift.

Her liquid intake suffers the most during the chaotic hours in the emergency department.

"We live off caffeine. We live off energy drinks," she added.

"Because we need to stay awake, in ED, you don't get sleep breaks. You're on constant high alert for your whole shift."

Nurses with rotating schedules like Murray report more "irregular" eating patterns and higher food consumption and more late night snacking than their fixed shift counterparts.

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The solution may sound easy enough: eat better and sleep more.

But everyone agrees it is not so simple.

Clark said healthcare operators and hospitals should take more responsibility for the health of essential workers by providing healthy food on-site.

"Because usually it's just fast food that's available overnight," she said.

And as for workers craving the sugar hit during or after a long night on the job, she recommended swapping a chocolate bar for flavoured fruit yogurt or a snack filled with fiber.

Wolhuter said he needed to leave shift work altogether to improve his health after having a family.

It involved a sizeable pay cut and a move to a different stream of healthcare.

"But I've got a great sleep routine, I eat healthier, I exercise more... it's just so good," Wolhuter said.

"I do look back [my old job] it and it's like... Wow, that work that I've done is really incredible.

"I wish I enjoyed it more when I was in the thick of it."

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