How shorter workdays contribute to cost savings

STOCKHOLM: In February, after almost two years worth of sixhour workdays, nurses at the Svartedalens elderly care facility in Gothenburg, Sweden, went back to eight-hour shifts — despite recently published research showing the benefits of the shortened workdays.

The City of Gothenburg didn’t extend the experiment in part because funding ran out. It cost about 12 million krona (RM5.7 million) to hire the 17 extra staff members needed to fill the gaps created by shorter work hours.

The city had only budgeted for two years, and legislators said it would be too expensive to implement the project across the entire municipality.

So, for now, the project has come to an end. Yet, there are longer term savings the study didn’t take into account. Working shorter hours resulted in healthier workers, researcher Bengt Lorentzon found in a new paper.

Specifically, the nurses took fewer sick days than they did when working longer, eight hour days. They also took fewer sick days than nurses in the control group. In fact, they took fewer sick days than nurses across the entire city of Gothenburg.

Overall, they took 4.7 per cent fewer sick days over the period of the experiment, while nurses in the control group took 62.5 per cent more sick days over the same time frame. Nurses who worked fewer hours took less unexpected time off, too.

While the study found health and productivity benefits, it didn’t measure the potential long-term cost savings of healthier nurses. But one thing was clear, Lorentzon said: These improved attitudes and health led to higher quality care at the nursing home.

In general, the working population of nurses in Sweden are in worse health than the average Swede. The women in the facility have higher body mass indices than the average worker, for example.

While the study didn’t run long enough to fully measure health effects of shorter days, the research indicated nurses working only six hours would experience permanent health benefits, resulting in savings.

Healthier employees spend half as much on health care, a new study published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings found. Looking at 10,000 employees at a health system in Florida, researchers found that those who were in “ideal” cardiovascular health, using the American Heart Association’s Life’s Simple 7 measurement, spent US$4,000 (RM17,600) a year less on healthcare costs than those in “poor” heart health.

“A more complete analysis (of Sweden) would include the upside of having done it,” said Eduardo Sanchez, one of the authors of the American study and chief medical officer for prevention at the American Heart Association. Bloomberg