Citation

Wong K, Chan AHS, Ngan SC. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2019; 16(12): e16122101.

Affiliation

Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China. scngan@cityu.edu.hk.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2019, MDPI: Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute)

DOI

10.3390/ijerph16122102

PMID

31200573

Abstract

There has been no subsequent meta-analysis examining the effects of long working hours on health or occupational health since 1997. Therefore, this paper aims to conduct a meta-analysis covering studies after 1997 for a comparison. A total of 243 published records were extracted from electronic databases. The effects were measured by five conditions, namely, physiological health (PH), mental health (MH), health behaviours (HB), related health (RH), and nonspecified health (NH). The overall odds ratio between long working hours and occupational health was 1.245 (95% confidence interval (CI): 1.195-1.298). The condition of related health constituted the highest odds ratio value (1.465, 95% CI: 1.332-1.611). The potential moderators were study method, cut-point for long weekly working hours, and country of origin. Long working hours were shown to adversely affect the occupational health of workers. The management on safeguarding the occupational health of workers working long hours should be reinforced.

Language: en

Keywords

health behaviours; mental health; occupational health; occupational injury; physiological health; sleep disturbance; working class