- Every Australian, wherever they work in Australia,
whatever our work tasks, and whatever
our working arrangements, deserve physical
and psychologically healthy and safe work.
It's our right.
Today I'd like to tell you about the work
to provide greater clarity for employers
around the duties for work health and safety
and worker's compensation in psychological health
and safety.
Our public discourse has changed.
Claire referred to the changing nature of work
well our attitudes to psychological injuries have,
thank goodness, changed.
How many of you have yourself, or have a loved one
who has a pyschological injury caused by work or non-work?
Doesn't it make it real for all us to know
that as health and safety professionals,
we need to drive the charge to make this
a thing of the past.
Thank goodness Australia is now
a more compassionate community.
There is destigmatisation of some conditions,
particularly anxiety and depression and our footballers
and other heroes have done lots to destigmatise that
in Australian community.
I'd say we have some significant challenges
still ahead for us on psychosis and some
of the more serious psychological injuries.
We now recognise that work related psychological injuries
are real.
They're not a sign of weakness.
It can happen to any of us if the stressors are prolonged
or severe enough.
Importantly, they're preventable.
We know what causes them and we know how to fix them.
And they're compensable.
There are more effective treatments.
The advent of better medications,
behavioural based therapies,
can change the prognosis significantly.
There's been a great move towards fit certificates
that we should all applaud where we look at ability
rather than disability and do all that we can
to encourage people back to safe work as early as they can.
We all know the recognition of the great business case
for creating psychologically healthy and safe work.
But sometimes, our attitudes in communities remain complex
and sometime contradictory.
Earlier in the year I had the great pleasure
in speaking with a number of people I consider
my mentors and thought leaders in this space
and the wonderful Nick Glozier who some of you may know
from university in Sydney, and I were talking
about this conflicted space and he said many managers
want to manage health and safety better.
They really wanna support the people.
Nobody goes to work wanting to damage their people,
but their concerned, they're worried about what's the cost.
What's this actually gonna cost me to fix it?
Might I be held responsible for something
that I didn't cause?
And might I, if I ask, might I actually be making
the situation worse?
I think we can all, in our own workplaces
and our histories, think that these concerns are real
and we need to address them.
Work related psychological injuries,
despite our great changing attitudes
and our better treatment remain a problem.
We know that there certainly sectors
that experience it more severely
and that there's certain types of hazards and risks
which increase the propensity to have
a psychological injury.
Work related psychological injury claims are very serious
and they're very expensive, both at a human
and financial level and they cost the Australian economy
enormous amounts of money.
It's wasted effort.
We can and should be doing better.
It's, I think, salutary to think about what's going on.
This survey that was released in 2017 shows
some of those insights about the difference in attitudes
and resistance points for physical
versus psychological injuries.
You can see the very stark and rather concerning difference
in the barriers if you have a physical injury
versus a psychological, and I think some of this
goes to the point that Nick made earlier that I quoted
about the confusion about what and how they can help.
There's cause for an integrated and systematic approach.
Professor Nicky Ellis, who many of you will know,
has been a forefront leader in this thinking.
There's an increasing interest
in the biopsychosocial approach and any of you
who look closely at our jurisdictional websites
will know the increasing information
that they're providing to us on this which says
we need to think about the whole person
and all of the factors that might relate
to their psychological injury.
We are seeing schemes broaden their assessment criteria
and including biomedical and administrative claims data
and looking at psychosocial data, but we need to keep
the support going.
We must also provide them with the support to address
the psychological risk factors.
Challenges remain for us all as health
and safety professionals on how to design safe work
and safe systems of work for at-risk individuals.
We don't step away, that this can sometimes
be challenging, and as Nick was talking to me earlier
in the year, he recognises the elephant in the room
that we'll all have to deal with, is that how we respond
to situations at work is shaped by our experiences
and our perceptions of event.
When somebody has had negative experiences
both inside and outside the work site, to some extent,
we're primed and we might be overreactive
to what other people might perceive
as relatively benign experiences.
I think we can all relate to that ourselves
and it goes to the heart of the exposure.
If it's repeated, they begin to be primed to think
that might have not triggered them in the past but now will.
But we don't always agree on what causes
work related stress and I think it's salutary to look
at this study that I've found that was
a large international piece that look about
what employers thought were the big issues
that were challenging both in how work is done
and were the pressures personal and work related
and what workers thought.
Whilst there's high levels of agreement,
there's some interesting levels of disagreement.
There lies one of our challenges.
If we go in the process to identify and access risks
and we only ask one person, perhaps the owner
of the business and we fail to consult the people
who are doing the work, we all get one answer.
If we only ask workers, we'll get a different one.
What we need to do is ask everybody who's involved
in the work, what are the big issues here
and importantly, what can we do about them?
Safe Work Australia recognised that despite the plethora
of information out there, some employers remain confused
and in preparing the guide that I'm going to talk about,
the Work Safe colleagues around the country and I
had a look at the resources and we collated
over five pages of hyperlinks to amazing resources
produced by the regulators
and the worker's compensation authorities,
groups like Beyond Blue and information
on the Heads Up website, fantastic material,
but in fact, that might even be part of our problem.
How does an organisation sift through
that huge volume of information and find the bit
that's right for them?
So it was really good to hear Claire,
and I believe Queensland has a similar initiative,
where they're going to help make that process
easier for workplaces so that the pre-filtering
of information occurs and it drives them to the areas
where it's most useful.
We were hearing repeatedly through our consultations
about some of the areas of confusion.
It came, at its heart, down to what are
my legal requirements?
What must I do to be found compliant?
If the Work Safe inspectors come, what will they
be looking for and what, if I wanna go beyond the minimum
and I wanna strive to best practice,
what does that look like and how is it different
from minimum compliance?
How can I identify these psychosocial hazards?
What even are they, and are there free and simple ways
to assess risks, or do I need to employ
a very expensive consultant?
The answer is no to that.
What are the most effective and practical control measures?
And is there evidence to base them up?
And then how, if somebody is hurt, do I support my workers
to get back safely as quickly as they can?
And what are the reasonable practical adjustments
you expect me, as an employer, to making?
Where, in all of this, does mental health promotion
and general health promotion fit in terms
of minimum compliance and best practice?
Safe Work Australia Members recognised there was a need
and have, over the last 18 months, developed a guidance.
This document is one piece of the puzzle.
It's not the whole piece.
What it does will provide authoritative guidance
to PCBUs and employers about the work health
and safety duties under the work health and safety acts
and the duties under worker's compensation acts.
It does not replace everything, but it provides
a clear authoritative platform from which you can build
and move beyond compliance and then using
other guidance out there to better practice.
The guide is for employers and PCBUs.
In the future, we expect there will be additional material
for workers and others and whilst there's some information
about workers' responsibilities in the document,
it's fairly restricted.
It includes a whole range of information
that's typically in a guide.
What's its scope?
But it has three important areas that it looks on.
First of all, it takes an integrated
and systematic approach, so it starts, where what
the prevention duties are and the way to use
a risk managed approach.
It talks about the need for early intervention
and those elements that are obligatory
under health and safety and worker's compensation laws
and those which are better practice
and it touches on the duties for the provision
of workers' compensation, supporting return at work
and return to work.
It does this fairly briefly because
there's wonderful material on all
the jurisdictions' websites already on that.
And it provides some clarity about how
workplace health promotion fits in with that context.
You may have noticed that there's a whole plethora
of words that are used.
Are we saying psychological injuries?
Are we saying mental illness?
Mental health conditions?
One of the things that Safe Work Australia members decided
is that we'd put a glossary at the back
which clearly define those terms and what we mean by them.
There was a deliberate intention and decision
to use the term work related psychological injuries
because that's the compensable term,
but we shouldn't get too tense about this.
Basically we're all talking about the same things.
The national guide is quite different
from any other document that Safe Work Australia Members
have developed.
They recognise that, and this probably resonates with you.
Out there in real workplaces, there isn't actually
an artificial divide between work health and safety
and early intervention and return to work.
In fact, you're probably all doing it
as a totally integrated approach already,
so whilst this division's in our head,
there isn't divisions in your head.
So they said, "okay, we're gonna try for the first time
"to have a document that includes all of those
"in the one guide."
It does make it long and we don't apologise for that
because they'll be other supplementary material
which is shorter and where you can go
and get more specific information.
I'd like to draw your attention to the inner circle.
For me, this goes to the heart of it.
There is a lot of information out there
on psychological health and safety
and there are many proponents that are saying
there's an absence of laws, that psychological injury
isn't covered, there's lack of clarity,
and we would say they're incorrect.
The existing health and safety legislation
includes psychological health.
It's already there under an obligation,
but we realise that perhaps we hadn't drawn it out
clearly enough, and this guide might go some way
to actually clarifying duties.
But at its heart is the need to design good work
and safe systems of work to apply
a risk management process to monitor and review
that that process has been effective to provide
the training information and supervision required
and to show leadership and management commitment
to psychological health and safety.
And as always, consultation, cooperation, and coordination
between all those that have a duty.
Those elements apply in every single section
whether it's prevention, early intervention, and recover.
We all know, this is second nature to you all,
that there is a legal duty for PCBUs to manage
the health and safety risks.
So far, as is reasonably practicable,
and for workers to take reasonable care
of their own and others' health and safety.
Employers to provide the appropriate support
should an incident occur.
I also wanted to take the time to actually put up
something you've all probably seen before
which is the reference to the offices' due diligence
and I've been a bit cheeky here
because I've inserted psychological.
It's in there, but perhaps it might help
provide some clarity to insert that.
When you're going back and being the champion
back in your own workplaces to remind your officers
that they have a duty to have an up-to-date knowledge
of all work health and safety matters
including psychological matters.
They need to understand the nature of their operations,
however they're changing, including knowing
what the psychosocial hazards are.
They need to make and use, and check they're being used,
resources and processes to control those risks
and they need to actually have the systems
for collecting information to monitor
that things are going on.
I noticed a changing debate which isn't yet settled,
but about the need to include psychological incidents
in your own voluntary reporting systems.
It's not yet obligatory under law, but I'd say
get ahead of the game and when you're creating
your own systems back in your own workplace,
put in the capacity to collect psychological incidents.
We need to verify the provision of those resources.
Reminding you all that in terms of this space,
psychological, so far, as is reasonably practicable, applies.
You, in helping the PCBUs, need to get them
to ask themselves, are there reasonably foreseeable risks
in this workplace?
And I think we could all go back to our own workplaces
and say, "yep."
Although looking at past events or into the future,
there are?
Could serious harm occur?
And there probably could.
Are there known effective controls?
Absolutely.
And are the costs of implementing those controls reasonable?
In all likelihood, they are, but beyond that,
one of my colleagues last night when I was talking to her
about this, said, "and don't forget to remind them
"about the long term benefits to their business
"in actually investing proactively
"in psychological health and safety."
We all know the benefits of doing it well
and I think it's salutatory to say that the mental health
and wellness programs will deliver extra benefits
on top of it, but they are desirable extras.
You need to ensure that our workplaces understand
that wellness programs are not a substitute
for identifying, assessing, and controlling
psychological risks.
They're great to do.
I absolutely support them, they're wonderful things,
but first, check that you've controlled the risks.
The same risk management process applies to physical
and psychological hazards and risks.
That's something that Safe Work Members wanted
to get out there very clearly.
You don't need to go and create a new process
if you don't want to, but you can apply
the standard risk management process of identifying,
assessing, controlling, and reviewing.
But I might just note that for this particular group
of hazards, if you know what the hazards are
and you've already got some great ideas of controlling them,
you don't necessarily have to go through
a whole assessment process.
Don't wait.
Implement the control and check they're effective.
I think sometimes we get bound up
in our risk assessment process and forget
the intention of this was to control the risks
and not just go through a paperwork process.
There are sound underpinnings to the national guide
and if you want to read more deeply, they're in
that list of academics.
This space is not new.
There has been work going on since the 1970s,
epidemiological work on this space.
We know what the hazards are, and we know
that they cause serious health problems
if they're not addressed.
The guide includes a list
of some common psychosocial hazards.
It won't cover everything.
You will need to apply it and think about the context
of your own working environment,
but there are some things which are pretty standard
you should be looking at.
High or low demands.
Excessive physical demands, cognitive or emotional demands
and I think if you cast your mind
around in your own work sites, you can think about times
where there's too much time pressure,
perhaps there's too many tasks to complete,
or if you're working emotionally demanding work,
you're trying to manage too many clients,
but it can also be stressful if you
have insufficient work to do.
Look the other side as well.
If people are bored and there's monotonous work,
that, too, can be a potential stressor.
We need to look at the level of job control
The literature tells us very clearly
if you have high demands and low job control
and low support, you will be moving into a position
called high job strain and the likelihood
of a psychological injury will significantly increase.
If there's high responsibility
without appropriate control, most of us like
to have responsibility, but who likes to have it
when we don't actually have a say on how things are done?
Not me.
We need to think about the level of support
and broaden how we think about this.
Very often, the first thing, if we talk in workplaces,
people say, "my colleagues being friendly.
"Can I talk to them about my problems?"
That's emotional support or my supervisor will talk to me.
But I'd also like you to challenge your workplaces
to look about the other kinds of support,
also informational support.
Do your people have the information they need
when and how they need it in the form
that they can comprehend to do their job well?
That's called informational support.
Does the equipment work right?
Who of us has had a situation where the IT system
has crashed or the car has broken down
that we need to travel to visit a client with?
If the equipment that allows you to do your job
is malfunctioning, that causes huge stress,
and the research shows us that's actually
extremely irritating for people when they know
it could've easily been predicted
and something done about it.
So then, to workplace relations and conflict.
We all know that this is often where it gets shown
in workplaces, that the other things will set.
If you like, they're the antecedents,
but the crisis point will be reflected
with somebody yelling or crying or being very distressed.
So turning your attention to the working relationships,
whether it's with clients or client's families
or supervisors.
Claire has mentioned the powerful stressors
of being bullied, harassed, or occupational violence showed
and when the Safe Work Australia members were considering
the guide, Victoria urged the members
to think about secondary exposures like those
to police officers, to ambulance officers,
where they're being repeatedly exposed
to distressing situations.
Low recognition and compared to the effort.
There's a theory called effort/reward imbalance
and we know that it is particularly stressful
if you're putting in lots of effort and your perception is
you're not being appropriated rewarded for the effort.
This can be financial reward or just recognition.
Wherever there's poor organisational justice,
there's also issues for workers working remotely
or in isolated working environments
and don't forget the powerful potential stressors
of working in physically dangerous
or unpleasant working environments.
Whilst we think that we tend to traditionally
turn our attention to psychological,
to demand and control support, I can remember
having a conversation with a psychiatrist
when we were working on some earlier documents
and I put working at height, and he said,
"what's that got to do with health and safety?"
Or working around unguarded machinery.
And I said, "I reckon that if you're working at heights
"without appropriate protection, you're gonna be
"a little bit tense," and he thought about it and agreed.
The guide recognises that individuals, we're all different.
Our responses will vary.
Some days we'll have good days, some days
we'll have bad days, but over time,
if our responses may vary.
There are limits in the guide.
It isn't un-contained.
It's only so far as is reasonably practicable
and that the employer must make reasonable adjustments
if somebody has a psychological injury.
But there's a challenge that they also need
to concurrently be complying with other legislation
that operates in the space, such as anti-discrimination.
The guide says use the hierarchy or control if you want to
and it recognises that you will need, in all reality
in this space, a combination of risk controls,
unlike some other areas where perhaps you could find one,
you're gonna need a collection of them.
The first is to think about elimination.
This is a little tough in this space, we acknowledge,
and there are less examples of pure elimination.
I've put some of them up there, but your purpose there
is to actually look if there's some elements of the job
that can be completely removed so that the person
isn't being exposed and being stressed,
and perhaps it's about better workload management,
even eliminating unnecessary tasks.
One that's slightly controversial is that you might
be needing to ask in your organisation,
"are you the best person even to be delivering
"this service?
"Is somebody else better equipped?"
They have the plant and equipment and resources
to deliver this rather than you.
And then a practical issue that we were talking about
when developing the guide around occupational violence.
Can you completely eliminate that risk
by using remote payments?
I wanted to put this slide up here
and you may be wondering why.
In 2016, I had the great privilege of being invited by
the Dhimurru Aboriginal Organisation to and do
a two-way learning with them.
The Dhimurru Rangers provide health and safety
in Northeast Arnhem Land, in some of the most challenging
and difficult working environments in Australia.
I went up with some preconceptions
about the health and safety.
Most were proved incorrect.
I thought that they wouldn't understand
psychological health and safety.
They got it.
What they taught me and reminded me
was that job design, so that elimination process,
does not have to be complicated.
Here's some rangers out doing some work
in the indigenous protected areas.
This slide, on my very first day,
so I hadn't had any influence at this point,
I turned up at Dhimurru and sat in on toolbox
and I was blown away 'cause without even knowing it,
these guys, and English is their fifth language,
fourth or fifth languages, there's many
different clans there, they were doing job design.
They just asked at the beginning of each day
before they went out to work, what do we have to do?
where do we have to do it? how are we gonna do it?
who's gonna work together? And together, as workers,
they collaborated and planned the day's job
including the difficult tasks.
You'll note there's something called baru discussions there.
Baru are the crocodiles.
They has insight, well, there was a crocodile out
on the loose there, and they actually had
a whole discussion that then that went on
what were the physical risks associated
with handling crocodiles.
It was an eye opening example.
And then, lastly, we think about administrative controls
and often in health and safety in this space,
the people start with it.
They start with policies and procedures.
I'm gonna be a bit challenging here and say
policies and procedures in this space
are like planned operating manuals.
They just describe the way the work should be undertaken
to be safe.
They don't inherently make it safe.
We do need our policies and procedures,
but don't rely on them.
You're gonna have to do the other upstream things as well.
There are opportunities to think about how to use
job rotation and I would challenge us all
to think more deeply about effective training
for managers and staff around workload management,
work redesign, and personnel management,
and dealing with aggressive clients and the like.
PPE is an interesting one.
When I was thinking about what we might put in
the guide here, my colleagues and the inspectors
and Victoria and New South Wales and Queensland
and others said, "well, you do all the PPE you do
"for physical stressors, risks because you wanna
"manage those, but actually, there's some other things
"you might wanna think that are context specific
"for workers as well."
In fact, the iTrackers, the Dhimurru aboriginal rangers
use that so when they're out working alone
a long way from the base, they know exactly
where their workers are and if they're late.
There are alternative risk management models
and Safe Work Australia Members recognise this.
You don't have to use the risk management model.
You can use others, but we're saying that just be aware
that you're actually truly meeting the requirements
under the act.
I put this up here to provide some clarity.
For us, primary prevention, secondary prevention,
and tertiary prevention, you can map it
to the hierarchy of control and to supporting recovery
at work.
There's also other models that talk
about organisational, environmental,
and individual level controls and you can also map those
if you like onto the hierarchy of control
and other models.
It's not a one or another, but pick your model
and apply it systematically and ensure
that you've met your duty.
The guide also outlines employer's duties
for early intervention and worker's compensation.
There's a plethora of material on this.
None of it is new in the guide but it does
bring it together into one authoritative space.
But wherever people work around Australia
and whatever the workers' compensation arrangements,
there are huge amounts of similarity.
The guide captures the obligations across Australia,
but you may need to go to the specific requirements
in your state if you want more details.
Putting it all together.
It's not that difficult.
We need to help our employers identify
the hazards and risks, including the psychological hazards
and risks and chemical of hazards and risks
and physical hazards and risks.
We need to support them to implement
effective risk management including work design,
redesign, and workload management to monitor the impact
of those controls, to show leadership and commitment,
to develop and use policies.
Policies are no good if they're sitting on the shelf
and they're not actually built
into normal business processes.
And to train workers.
Our workers need to actively participate
in risk assessments and implement agreed controls.
To complete and implement the training
that they've been given, and to comply
with policies and procedures.
I'd also say that although it can be challenging,
we as workers need to tell our managers
if we're struggling.
Employers can't make reasonable modifications
if they don't know we're struggling.
We need to tell people and to share if we need help.
Flipping it now also back onto the other side,
thinking about a corrective focus.
So something has gone wrong,
what's an organisational systems focus that's required?
The PCBU employer needs to set up
effective reporting mechanisms.
That includes for the incidents that will tell them
what is going on in their workplace.
To train their staff in workload and stress management.
To investigate proactively concerns wherever they're raised
and take action.
To intervene early whenever their people are saying
they're experiencing distress.
Appoint contact officers and actively support
return to work and where possible remain at work.
And our workers, we need to report problems.
We need to seek and us EAP and actively participate
in our return to work programs.
There are lots of resources out there.
Here's some of them that will supplement the guide.
Go to any of your jurisdictional websites.
There are fantastic material available.
One of the questions I get asked is
about risk assessment tools and I'd draw your attention
to a free risk assessment tool, is published
on the Queenslander website called People at Work
and that was co-founded by Comcare,
Safe Work Australia members, and Queensland.
There are lots of different risk assessment tools.
This one just happens to be free and have normative data
for over 10,000 people.
There are also some wonderful documents out there
in terms of best practice approach to move you
beyond compliance into better practice.
I think it's salutatory to finish by saying
we have come a very long way, so whenever
you get despairing, think about how far we've come
and with your effort, collectively,
we'll keep making progress.
(audience applauds)
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