• This occurs when you have less than 8 hours continuous sleep per day over a significant period. The broken sleep patterns can be in excess of 50% of your sleep period giving you around 4 hours rest every 8 hours sleep. If this broken sleep occurs continuously (and depending on other aspects of your health) you may experience micro sleeps or [pass out during a crucial task at your workplace. A known contributor to broken sleep patterns is obesity at any level. Another risk to sleep debt is reduced sleep periods (less than 8 hours) or shift sleeping (where the 8 hours is deliberately broken up into shorter more frequent sleeps.
• Candidates and employees must ensure that their sleep periods are adequate enough to provide good rest periods to let the body and mind replenish. Shift change meetings in certain industries (such as mining) train their supervisors to assess each person for signs and symptoms of fatigue and have counter measures to ensure you cannot enter the workplace in this condition.

•  Persons who insist on arriving at work with a known illness (the flu, strains, disease, etc…) are now fatigued as their body has already been busy fighting their illness, and they have probably experienced some sleep debt on top of this.

• Being under the influence of alcohol or other drugs is prohibited as the impairment upon cognition is unquantifiable – therefore banned.

IN2 Staffing Solutions and its client will also require you to immediately disclose the use of prescription drugs so that a search can be performed on the medication to ensure that prohibitions for machinery or vehicle use are verified and complied with.

• Your diet is an important factor in being fit for work. It is common knowledge that excessive intake of certain food groups with little exercise contributes to obesity. You must also consider how your type of diet will affect your energy levels in certain environments, for example, the consumption of heavy / saturated fatty food in the hot summer will draw the blood away from your extremities to the digestive system to process digestion. This makes it harder for your blood to cool through your extremities and circulate through your body to reduce your body temperature.

• The effects of working long hours are well known and sparked the reasonable hours test case last decade. Prolonged work hours or shifts, simply tires a person physically and mentally to the extent that the person’s reduced physical strength and cognition adversely affects their ability to perform reliably safe work.

IN2 Staffing Solutions does employ controls for reasonable hours of work that includes travel time and is contained within its Fitness For Work Policy. The most important issue that candidates and employees must manage, is the reporting of their fatigue issues to their supervisor and or IN2 Staffing Solutions consultant and implement controls that reduce your potential for a work or travel related incident.

• Personal fitness is reduced by varying influences in and outside of the work environment. A person’s inactive lifestyle / social habits where physical activities performed are of low levels, may be a contributing factor to immobility, weight gain, and over-exertion.
• Prior to the commencement of physically demanding work, you should perform stretching exercises with your body parts that are most likely to be used the most for your job. This will ensure a degree of limbering is achieved preventing strains and sprains.

• Fitness for work is affected by persons not frequently rehydrating in hot work environments and climates. A low rehydration replenishment rate would be 4 – 6 litres per day with hotter climates and excessive work demands requiring a higher rate. It is essential that workers being placed to work in remote or isolated locations must have adequate water to rehydrate for the duration of their task.
• The most effective rehydration fluid is water. Isotonic drinks, soft drinks, cordials and fruit juices do not offer rehydration as effective as water. To assist in the reduction of dehydration, supplementary controls such as brimmed hats, long sleeved shirts, the provision of shade, rest regimes, neck coolers and ventilation should be provided at the work site.

Symptoms / signs of dehydration may involve the following

•  Headache
• Dizziness
• Nausea / Vomiting
• Fainting
• Dark urinary discharge

If you experience these, seek immediate rehydration, report it to your supervisor and rest. If required, a first aider should refer you to professional treatment.

• As explained in IN2 Staffing Solutions’ Fitness for Work Policy, persons who are under the influence of alcohol or other drugs may be deemed as unfit for safe work. As an individual’s tolerance and intolerance levels to these may differ due to their physiology, all levels of influence are difficult to attach to levels of impairment. Due to this anomaly, all levels of influence are treated as potential triggers for impairment which cannot be tolerated when lives may be at risk. Therefore blanket prohibitions for any detected level of alcohol or drugs levels in a person by a tester, will apply across most client sites and industries.

• As an employee / candidate, you have given your consent to be tested for alcohol and other drugs during your employment and may be subjected to testing either by IN2 Staffing Solutions, and or the client. There are two mainstream testing methods used –

1. Breath Air Analyser – This is a calibrated device operated by a qualified person who takes a sample of your breath through the device which will detect and measure the level of alcohol in your breath air sample.
2. Salivical Tester –  This is a swab which you are required to place in your mouth and provide a compliant sample. The mid-range testers will detect a positive or negative reading of the presence of 5 different drug groups within your system on an indicator built into the swab device.

In the event of returning a positive reading for alcohol or other drugs, you will be required to either proceed to a registered testing provider or a GP for further urine or blood testing, or be stood down from work pending further testing. Persons delivering positive results are not permitted to work.

• Persons who have known diseases or illnesses that are openly contagious must not frequent a workplace where other person’s health is put at risk. If and when you decide not to attend work due to these circumstances, it is important that you give your IN2 Staffing Solutions consultant and the client enough notification so that a replacement can be made. Where a person has a significant illness that has prevented them from being away from work for more than two days, a doctors certificate should be provided to IN2 Staffing Solutions indicating that they are fit to return to full duties.

• Some aspects of higher risk work may involve passive exposures or unplanned exposures to materials that required medical assessment, and ongoing health surveillance programs. These programs may involve spirometries for occupational dust exposures causing lung diseases, blood testing for poisoning, absorption of toxins, exposure to isocyanates, etc…