Psychological health is the fastest growing workers compensation claims area in Australia and is starting to cost businesses significant amounts of money.

For this reason governments around Australia are introducing new Psychological Health Regulations that will impose a positive duty of care on employers/Persons Conducting a Business or Undertaking (PCBU’s).

This means that employers/PCBUs can be fined for not proactively addressing Psychosocial Health in their workplace such as having policies, procedures and training in place.

Psychosocial hazards can be defined as:

Any factor or factors in the work design, systems of work, management of work, carrying out of work or personal or work-related interactions that may arise in the working environment and may cause an employee to experience one or more negative psychological responses that create a risk to their health and safety.

One of the main duties will be to have a mechanism to identify Psychosocial health hazards in the workplace and some of these include:

• Bullying
• Sexual harassment
• Aggression or violence
• Exposure to traumatic events or content
• High or low job demands
• Low job control
• Poor support
• Poor organisational justice
• Low role clarity
• Poor environmental conditions
• Remote or isolated work
• Poor organisational change management
• Low recognition and reward
• Poor workplace relationships.

The Queensland Government has developed a useful risk assessment Tool that can be found here which can be used to kick off the process.

Watch this page for further updates.