According to Christopher Phillips, a licensed respiratory care practitioner and polysomnographic technologist at Butler Memorial Hospital, the numbers of people being diagnosed with a sleep disorder are rising.

"Each time I hear the statistics, every year, it's higher," he said. "Right now, about 18 percent of the male population and 9 percent of the female population (suffer from poor sleep). (That) figures out to millions."

Phillips is also the chairman of the Greater Pittsburgh Sleep Professionals. His organization hosts a conference for the sleep society every year.

His group, along with the National Institute of Health, is working to teach businesses about how to go about promoting better sleep patterns.

"There's a trend," Phillips said, "NIH is trying to get industry to 'wake up' to workers problems."

"American society, in and of itself, is sleep deprived," he said. "In fact, our society has evolved to where they look on people who insist on getting their sleep as being lazy."

In the past, Phillips said he would get phone calls at 10 a.m. on a Saturday morning when he worked regular night shifts.

The person on the calling end would give him a hard time, saying "You're still in bed! What are you still in bed for?" Phillips said, mimicking their surprise.

"When I was a kid, after "(The Tonight Show With) Johnny Carson" was over, the TV went off. Our society promotes poor sleep habits. Now, TV's 24 hours a day. You can do your banking at 2 in the morning; you can shop at (the grocery store).

"There's a thing called sleep hygiene. You can't plug people in just anywhere and expect them to (perform)."

Phillips explained many accidents occur because of sleep deprivation often associated with shift work.

He specifically listed Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island nuclear power plant disaster of 1979, the Challenger space shuttle disaster of 1986 and the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil

spill as occurring due to workers who were sleep deprived.

Dean Schnur, 65, of Herman worked shift work at Armco Steel

(now AK Steel)

for 33 years.

"Just about the time you ended the 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. shift, you had to sleep during the day," he said. "I'd hear everything going on. People'd be calling. I didn't care for it.

"The worst for me was if the humidity was up. Everyone you'd look at would be sleepy and trying to stay awake. I heard it takes years off your life when you work shift work, and I believe it. I probably retired a couple of years earlier because of that shift. I just wanted to get out of there."

One of the things the NIH, and the sleep community in particular, are doing is to educate businesses about good sleep hygiene.

The group says bright lights in the workplace, lengthening the number of days in a shift and changing shifts with the clock - going from the midnight shift to daylight, then afternoon - are just a few things that will improve employee productivity. NIH says the changes will also lessen the number and severity of accidents and decrease the amount of sick time used.

When Schnur worked, the shifts changed from midnight (11 p.m. to 7 a.m.) to afternoon/evening (3 to 11 p.m.) to daylight (7 a.m. to 3 p.m.) - which is just the opposite of what the sleep community suggests.

According to Schnur, AK Steel has made some of the changes Phillips and his people are urging. Now the employees change shifts with the clock.

Schnur doesn't miss the shift work though, and he doesn't regret retiring.

"I love going to bed every night," he said.