Practical cases of occupational health services for workers working long overtime in Japan

This study describes the measures actually implemented for the prevention of health effects from overtime work. We inquired 25 exemplary companies in Japan regarding; (1) how to define overtime and how to select workers to be interviewed, (2) what are the information collected at the interview, (3) how to implement the interview effectively, and (4) how to handle information collected at the interview. In addition to the effort of measuring working hours accurately, frequency of holiday work, subjective sensation of workload, sleeping time, human relationship at work, or information collected by occupational health nurses were also evaluated. It is important for occupational health professionals to keep medical confidentiality of the records at the interview, to promote reliable conversation with the workers.