Managing psychosocial hazards at work - Community care

Persons conducting a business or undertaking, or PCBU for short, must ensure the health and safety of workers and others. This includes managing psychosocial hazards and risks at work as much as managing physical hazards and risks. PCBUs must manage psychosocial risks in accordance with Part 3.1 of the Work Health and Safety Regulation. This includes eliminating psychosocial hazards so far as is reasonably practicable. Psychosocial hazards must be identified and their risks assessed, controlled, and continually reviewed to protect workers' health and safety. A psychosocial hazard arises from, or relates to, the design or management of work, a work environment, plant at a workplace, or workplace interactions and behaviours. It may cause psychological harm, whether or not it also causes physical harm. PCBUs must consult with their workers about psychosocial hazards relevant to their work. Workers often have valuable insights about the impact of psychosocial hazards and potential ways to control the risks.

In this video, we're exploring a case study from the healthcare and social services industry. We will review how this workplace identifies, assesses, controls and reviews, the psychosocial hazards and risks in their workplace. See if you can spot the hazards and risks before we give you the answers. Let's learn a bit about our workplace. Company A is a large private sector organisation delivering healthcare and social services in the community to disabled adults and children. Some with severe behavioural issues. Work activities occur largely in their clients' homes, but can include transporting clients on excursions to a park, shopping centre, or other locations where members of the public are often present. Workers are often alone and are employed on a casual or contract basis. Minimal time is allowed for travel between clients, which forces workers to rush. Workers receive minimal training and lack knowledge of procedures or available support in the event of an emergency, including instances of client aggression. Workers have been injured by clients and do not report these incidents to the organisation. Workers are reluctant to raise concerns with the organisation in case they lose their job.

Let's take a look at what psychosocial hazards and risks are present. Workers have limited time to provide services and insufficient travel time between clients causing them to rush. They're unable to take rest breaks due to inadequate time or support. For example, being unable to leave clients unsupervised in public places. They're also experiencing high physical and emotional demands due to the nature of care provided, such as heavy lifting and responding to challenging behavioural issues. Workers are also regularly being exposed to violent and aggressive behaviours from clients. These behaviours can be exacerbated by insufficient time to provide services. They're also required to work in people's homes and in the community without coworkers. There is a lack of clarity and information regarding emergency response procedures, including responding to violence and aggression and remote work procedures. Their employment is insecure as many are casual employees or contractors, which adds to their fear of reporting health and safety concerns to their employer as they may risk ongoing work.

After consulting with supervisors, work groups and health and safety representatives, the organisation takes the following steps to control the risks. Company A reviews their worker ratios and travel time to ensure sufficient workers are rostered to complete the required work tasks. They implement a risk assessment of each site location, or community activity before providing a service for new clients and/or new site location for care activity. When managing risks, consideration is given to the client's home environment, previous history, and any other relevant factors that may increase risks to workers. If the risks are assessed as too high, service is refused until changes can be made to eliminate or minimise the risk. Policies are introduced and enforced to ensure that when a client has been assessed as likely to exhibit violent or aggressive behaviours, two workers are allocated to provide care, or care is provided in a controlled environment. Work activities are regularly reviewed to ensure workload is manageable and additional support and training is provided as needed. Regular communication and consultation opportunities are introduced to ensure workers receive up-to-date information and connection with the organisation. Professional supervision and debriefing systems are also implemented. Workers receive information and training on violence and aggression, incident reporting, emergency response procedures and support services with an increased focus on prevention and early intervention. Communication processes, equipment such as mobile phones and duress alarms, and training are introduced to address isolated work risks, including device monitoring to ensure appropriate and timely response to an emergency situation. Employment agreements and entitlements are reviewed and adjusted where possible to enable more stable and secure employment opportunities. The organisation also reviews and improves the risk controls, and they identify and assess risks and the adequacy of controls through psychosocial risk assessment tools such as the People at Work Survey, they continually monitor and review other safety data available to them, such as incident reporting, exposure to violence and aggression, sickness, absence, and turnover data. They actively encourage reporting of incidents and health and safety concerns and ensure all reports are investigated in a timely manner in accordance with procedures. They ensure workers are provided with information on incident investigations and complaints lodged and opportunities input during the investigation process regarding controls and safety issues. Workers are provided with support, including information about professional supervision, options, and other internal and external support services. They conduct regular monitoring and review of controls, clients' needs and behaviours to ensure adequacy of controls. They deliver ongoing training to workers in relation to their role activities performed, and policies and procedures for managing risk to ensure competency remains current. They conduct a security review of worker safety while working in isolation and emergency responses available to workers.

In this example, we saw how to identify different psychosocial hazards in a healthcare and social assistance organisation. Often these hazards will interact and if exposure is frequent, prolonged, and severe, can lead to work-related stress and subsequently psychological harm.

The identified hazards in this example included high job demands, violence and aggression, isolated work and low job control. Control measures were used at multiple levels to eliminate as well as minimise the risk. This example shows that psychosocial hazards, the types of control measures implemented, and the monitoring and review strategies can differ widely for organisations in different industries and of different sizes. It is important to consider the unique context of your organisation, including your organisation-wide systems, work practices, work environment, workplace behaviours, and types of tasks and roles.

For more information, download the Managing the Risk of Psychosocial Hazards At Work Code of Practice 2022.

[End of Transcript]