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When Megan McHugh was growing up in a leafy neighborhood of Chicago, her father was a homicide detective for the Chicago Police Department. Investigating murders was not a nine-to-five job, and her father often worked late into the night pulling extra shifts to solve cases. Her dad wanted Megan to have an easier life and he urged her not to follow in his footsteps. She took his advice and headed off to Saint Mary’s College in Indiana and majored in economics.
But after an internship in Washington, D.C., that allowed her to sit in on White House press briefings, McHugh became fascinated with public policy and healthcare. She decided to pursue a master’s degree in public policy from the College of William and Mary and then a PhD from George Washington University in D.C.
A series of research jobs led her back to Chicago where she took a position at the American Hospital Association. Through her job she met some professors at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University and they urged her to join them, which she did in 2011 as an Assistant Professor in the Center for Health Services and Outcomes Research. Not long after, she heard about a research opportunity being funded by The Christine and Paul Branstad Family Foundation. The foundation was interested in improving the health of a large Illinois manufacturer’s workforce, and the Fortune 500 company had agreed to provide anonymized data on the health of its workers.
McHugh dove into the work and loved it. She studies the health of shift workers, those who work at night or outside the traditional 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. day. Shift work is prevalent in many industries, including public safety and manufacturing. Many large manufacturing plants dominate the economic activity in small communities—so-called company towns. Almost uniformly, the healthcare outcomes for these shift workers are not positive. “Manufacturing is a paradox,” says McHugh. “Employees have good access to health care and the jobs pay well. On the other hand, workers tend to be less healthy. There’s a lot of opportunity for improvement.”
I think so highly of the people who work in these plants, how hard they work. I feel inspired to do this.
Megan McHugh, MPP, PhD
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Some of the reasons behind the paradox aren’t hard to figure out. The workers tend to be overweight and out of shape, and they experience high rates of diabetes, among other chronic conditions. They also tend to engage more frequently in poor health behaviors such as smoking and binge drinking and have poor sleep habits. The question for McHugh and her fellow researchers is what can be done to increase the health of workers without increasing the already high healthcare costs for their employers.
McHugh and her team are now testing whether a primary care clinic, opened in 2018, specifically for employees of the large Illinois manufacturer, can improve their health outcomes. The clinic is a version of upscale “concierge medicine” that allows for easier access to care and more time spent with physicians who can address lifestyle issues with their patients. The researchers are following those who use the clinic and hope to have results by next year.
The health of shift workers has become a hot topic given the COVID-19 pandemic and viral outbreaks in U.S. meatpacking plants, and McHugh, 44, is eager to continue her research. “It has introduced me to parts of the U.S. I wouldn’t visit or otherwise encounter,” she says. “I think so highly of the people who work in these plants, how hard they work. I feel inspired to do this.”