Chelsea Dyer grew up around shift work and its challenges. Now she’s built a company to help others navigate it more effectively.
When she was growing up, Chelsea Dyer learned one rule early on: don’t go near the front of the house when Mum is sleeping.
Her mother spent more than four decades in Victoria Police, and for much of that time she worked long, irregular hours that affected her energy, her recovery and her “ability to be present”.
“I saw it take its toll on her,” Dyer told Safe to Work. “Not just on her health and her energy, but even how she could recover and get back to normal.”
That experience planted a seed in Dyer’s mind. Years later, that seed blossomed into digital health solutions provider Valus Health.
Filling the gap
As a naturopath and nutritionist with a background in digital health education and learning design, Dyer practices what she preaches.
Early on in her career, colleagues in nursing, paramedicine and other shift-based roles began asking her questions: What should I eat on a night shift? When is the best time to exercise? Why does it take several days to feel normal again?
As the questions kept coming, and the more Dyer listened, the clearer the knowledge gap became.
“I asked them what they’d learnt through work in that area,” she said. “A lot of it was really top-down structural advice, like policies and changes rather than education and empowerment for the workers themselves.”
“I definitely saw in the people I was around that there was a real want for better information, but it just wasn’t easily available.”
The missing element wasn’t research; in fact, Dyer discovered there was an enormous body of it. The problem was accessibility.
“It’s too overwhelming while you’re in it to go and try to find all the answers,” Dyer said. “Especially if that’s not your area of expertise and you’re just trying to get through your long shifts and your work.”
Realising that there was a distinct need for an easy-to-follow blueprint, Dyer founded Valus Health, which distils the science into three evidence-based digital programs: Shift Prime for night-shift workers; Job Site Prime for mining workers on extended or early/late shifts; and Work and Live Prime for office-based and high-demand workers.
Each program draws on hundreds of research papers and covers key pillars of worker health, including circadian rhythms, light exposure, food intake and timing, movement, sleep hygiene, social health and stress management. The content is self-paced and delivered entirely online, with interactive questions, short video content and, critically, a personalised action plan that participants build and download at the end of each module.
“A lot of the program isn’t just education, but empowerment for each individual to create actual, lasting habit changes,” Dyer said. “I wanted to make sure that it wasn’t just cookie-cutter advice and that participants could apply it easily to their own lives.”
The program also includes evidence-backed tips scattered throughout to provide people with practical, specific and research-backed nudges, for example, that eating dinner earlier has been shown to significantly improve sleep quality – helping people fall asleep up to 10 minutes faster, with up to 60 per cent less likelihood of waking during the night.
“They’re designed to give people the confidence and tools to believe they can actually make that change,” she said.
“It’s not overhauling everything about your health, your diet and your lifestyle. The program helps in understanding that a lot of it can be really simple changes to timing, which can create a huge shift to your health even in the short term.”
Built for industry
Valus Health’s business-to-business (B2B) model means companies enrol their staff members to the program – adding it to their mandatory training, sending a log-in link, and letting workers move through it at their own pace.
A quarterly check-in keeps the learning alive and gives workers the chance to revisit and update their personalised plans as life changes.
For mining, Dyer recommends Job Site Prime for most workers and Shift Prime for those working overnight. The digital format, she said, solves a logistical headache that often defeats in-person health education in demanding, remote industries.
“It can be quite a challenge to coordinate timetables and logistics of getting everyone in the same room,” she said.
“Being digital and self-paced really opens up that flexibility, it’s one less logistical challenge.”
As mine sites are faced with stronger duty-of-care obligations, particularly around fatigue, psychosocial health and proactive health education, companies are increasingly looking for credible, scalable solutions that help them get there.
“With these programs, I think sites are meeting those obligations in a really positive, employee-oriented way, and that’s more important than just simply ticking the box,” Dyer said.
Valus Health’s motto – ‘Knowledge to thrive’ – is derived directly from Dyer’s experience of her mum managing shift work. During some night shifts, her mum’s workplace would put on a big dinner at one in the morning, which at the time was probably considered best practice and more beneficial than harmful.
‘“Now, when I think about that it’s just about the opposite of what we now know about timing your food to best recover,” Dyer said. “But they obviously didn’t know. How would they?”
This kind of scenario captures exactly what Valus Health is trying to do – provide the right information, in the right way, at the right time.
“I think she would have had a very different experience,” Dyer said when asked how her mum would’ve fared if these digital programs existed at the time. “With the right knowledge and support, it could have reduced a lot of the strain she carried during those years. Not by removing the demands of the job, but by better equipping her to protect her health through them.”
For Dyer, it all comes down to the belief that people working the hardest jobs deserve the same shot at good health as anyone else. “I feel really strongly about everyone being able to have the opportunity to live their best, healthy lives,” she said. “No matter what they do for work.”
This feature appeared in the May-June edition of Safe to Work.
