Witnessing, investigating or being exposed to traumatic events or materials is a psychosocial hazard. It may include:
- witnessing or investigating a fatality, serious injury, abuse, neglect or other serious incident; for example, if you work in child protection
- being exposed to natural disasters: for example, emergency service workers responding to a bushfire
- supporting victims of painful and traumatic events: for example, providing counselling
- listening to or seeing traumatic materials: for example, reading victim testimonies or seeing evidence of a crime
- exposure to things that bring up traumatic memories.
A person is more likely to experience something as traumatic when it is unexpected, is perceived as uncontrollable, where there is a threat to life or safety, or where it is the result of intentional cruelty.
Identify and assess the risks
To learn if there is traumatic events or materials in your workplace (or the potential for it) look at everything from the work environment to work tasks, how they’re carried out, and the way work is designed and managed.
- Consult your workers. They may tell you they feel stressed, upset, anxious, on-edge, burnt out, helpless or have trouble sleeping. Talk with your health and safety reps and committee too.
- Observe work and behaviours. Tasks taking longer than expected, frequent mistakes or workers being less empathetic can be caused by exposure to traumatic events or materials.
- Review information such as overtime records, time off, injuries, incidents and near misses, and workers compensation claims.
- Use surveys and tools. If you have more than 20 workers may find the People at Work psychosocial risk assessment tool useful. Head4Work is suitable if you have 20 or less workers (see Psychosocial hazards resources).
- Have a way for workers to report their concerns, and treat these seriously and respectfully. That will encourage reporting and help you fix the problem.
- Identify other hazards present and consider them together. Hazards can interact and combine to create new, changed or higher risks. For example, traumatic events or materials may create a higher risk in workplaces with high job demands if workers are already feeling pressured.
- Consider how long, how often and how severely workers are exposed to hazards. The longer, more often and worse the exposure to traumatic events or materials, the higher the risk that workers may be harmed.
Practical control measures
Here are some ideas for control measure that can help you prevent and manage exposure to traumatic events or materials.
Do | Don’t |
Provide workers with information so they can report exposure to traumatic events, support options available | Expect that workers will cope with exposure to a traumatic event or materials: research shows this is not the case |
Avoid exposing workers to traumatic event: for example, only send essential workers to a disaster scene | Underestimate the psychological damage that can occur from witnessing traumatic incidents |
Flag or password-protect files with potentially distressing content to stop people opening them accidently | Forget to consult with workers in creating controls to manage their health |
Stop workers unnecessarily listening to or watching traumatic materials: for example, allow online moderators to remove users after a single serious breach instead of making them review all the content | |
Rotate roles or activities to ensure workers have adequate breaks from roles that are likely to expose them to traumatic events | |
Where repeated high-risk exposure to distressing events is an unavoidable part of a role, consider additional risk controls including reducing workload to decrease exposure, increasing breaks and recovery time, or implementing periodic health assessments for workers | |
Ensure all managers understand the work experienced by the workforce | |
Have procedures to support workers in response to exposure to traumatic events including practical support for workers, counselling/professional support services, and information about available resources | |
Provide managers with information and training so they can respond to/manage reported exposure of workers, including how to identify early signs of distress or psychological injury, and how to offer support if required |
Review your control measures
You must review your control measures to check they are working as planned. If your control measures aren’t managing the hazard or is creating new risks, you must make changes.
Get feedback from those affected by the changes, and include them in any modifications to their workplace or work routines. Look at your incident records to see if numbers are going down.
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Rights and responsibilities
Rights and responsibilities