A Practical PREVENTION Framework - with Jennifer Fry

Jennifer Fry:
You know, employers must provide and maintain a working environment that's safe and without risks to health and that includes psychological health. And we think that, you know, people overall have a reasonably good understanding of, you know, what it actually means to do a risk assessment approach for physical health but for psychological health as you guys know, it's just a bit harder concept.

So WorkWell has adopted the 11 work related factors that impact mental health as that framework. So it's trying to put some more practical language, I guess, around what those psychological risks are and hopefully we're building up some really practical and tangible how to assess those work related factors and how to actually control them. And, I guess, that's what we're asking all of the projects to explore that further.

But those 11 work related factors, I guess we just bang on about them quite a lot but, you know, they're things that people, you know, if we list them, people always sort of nod and say, yeah, they make sense. But they're the things that in workplaces if they're managed well, you're more likely to have a mentally healthy workplace. If they're not managed well, that's when we can tip people over into being stressed. So I won't go through all of them but just a couple of them, you know, it's high or low job demands. So if people are overworked, that obviously is a cause of stress. So, you know, we're talking about the root causes. Or if they're under worked, if people are going to work and not feeling that they've got meaning, feeling uncomfortable that they've just not got enough to do. That also can be a cause of stress.
Low role clarity. So if people go to work and don't actually know what they're meant to be doing, or that there's overlap between different jobs and not clear delineation of roles, that can be stressful.

Other things are, you know, poor workplace relationships and I think we, you know, that's the one that we often see, be that people are just not treated respectfully.
That people are bullied, that there might be sexual harassment, those sorts of things.
You know, if they're not managed well, if people are not in a respectful environment, that's a work-related risk that can lead to stress.

The other big ones are, you know, occupational violence, trauma, and obviously in a mentally healthy workplace those things, violence and aggression as much as possible, eliminate it, shouldn't happen. But if there is occupational violence or aggression that there are systems in place to minimise that and then to respond appropriately to it.

So they're sorts of the work related factors that we talk about. And a primary prevention approach is around addressing those, working out what the root causes of stress within the workplace is and the only way of finding that out is talking with staff. But using this framework of the 11 work related factors provides a really good language and process to actually work in that primary prevention space.