Incidents at work causing mental ill health - Reporting & Assessment

According to the definitions 3.8 and 3.9 in OHSAS 18001:2007, "incident" and "ill health" are defined as follows:

• Incident: Work-related event(s) in which
  • an injury
  • or ill health (regardless of severity)
  • or fatality
  occurred, or could have occurred.
• Ill health: Identifiable, adverse physical or mental condition arising from and/or made worse by a work activity and/or work-related situation.

Does anybody in this forum know about any systematic reporting and assessment (at her or his company site) of any work-related event where an identifiable, adverse mental condition (regardless of severity) arising from and/or made worse by a work activity and/or work-related situation occurred, or could have occurred?

Such an incident could be excessive mental workload (ISO 10075), unfair treatment at work, mobbing, bossing or even exposure to crime scenes (at police work) or the witnessing of suicides (e.g. train conductors).

Search keys: ISO 10075, mental workload, OHSAS 18001:2007, ill health, incident, mobbing, bossing, burnout, burn out, mental stress, 12 KPIs

Re: Incidents at work causing mental ill health

goetzkluge said:

Does anybody in this forum know about any systematic reporting and assessment (at her or his company site) of any work-related event where an identifiable, adverse mental condition (regardless of severity) arising from and/or made worse by a work activity and/or work-related situation occurred, or could have occurred?

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I suspect that people would not be willing to disclose such sensitive information about their place of employment.

But, a clear case is the military force with PTSD and high rate of suicide.

Re: Incidents at work causing mental ill health

Reg Morrison said:

I suspect that people would not be willing to disclose such sensitive information about their place of employment.

But, a clear case is the military force with PTSD and high rate of suicide.

Click to expand...

I agree to that. However, mental workload has to be assessed at sites with OH&S management systems which are certified for OHSAS 18001:2007. (In Europe, there also are legal requirements.) Mental workload which causes ill health has to be minimized.

Actually, based on ISO 10075, mental workload is a workplace property. The response to that is related to the individual employee. From the viepoint of OH&S management, it isn't the employee who has to lie on the couch for workload assessment. Rather, the workplace and the work situation is subject to evaluation and analysis. As for your example, incidents which cause or would have caused PTSD would have to be assessed, evaluated and counted rather than the individual cases which suffered from PTSD. (The example of course is clear in this field of "business". War is a generic cause of mental and physical ill health.)

From definition 3.8 and 3.9 in OHSAS 18001:2007 you can derive 12 kind of incidents which should be avoided by a OH&S management system. Such incidents or events can be counted. Thus, you have 12 KPIs which you can monitor (quarterly and annually) without having to describe individual cases.

How can one manage these 12 kind of incidents without monitoring them, that is, without measuring what is measurable (countable) in OH&S? OH&S management performance is measurable. This has been done since decades for accidents, fatalities and physical ill health.

goetzkluge said:

According to the definitions 3.8 and 3.9 in OHSAS 18001:2007, "incident" and "ill health" are defined as follows:

• Incident: Work-related event(s) in which
  • an injury
  • or ill health (regardless of severity)
  • or fatality
  occurred, or could have occurred.
• Ill health: Identifiable, adverse physical or mental condition arising from and/or made worse by a work activity and/or work-related situation.

Does anybody in this forum know about any systematic reporting and assessment (at her or his company site) of any work-related event where an identifiable, adverse mental condition (regardless of severity) arising from and/or made worse by a work activity and/or work-related situation occurred, or could have occurred?

Such an incident could be excessive mental workload (ISO 10075), unfair treatment at work, mobbing, bossing or even exposure to crime scenes (at police work) or the witnessing of suicides (e.g. train conductors).

Search keys: ISO 10075, mental workload, OHSAS 18001:2007, ill health, incident, mobbing, bossing, burnout, burn out, mental stress, 12 KPIs

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Are you looking for a reporting process or documentation or are you looking for causes of mental ill health??

If your looking for causes of mental ill health bullying and various other forms of harrasement and stress caused by any number of factors come to mind.

kgott said:

Are you looking for a reporting process or documentation or are you looking for causes of mental ill health?? ...

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A reporting process with good documentation helps to look for (and then to minimize) causes of physical and mental ill health.

At OHSAS 18001:2007 certified sites the monitoring of 12 kind of incidents as defined in clause 3.9 of that standard is required:


The reason why there are four rows for "ill health" can be found in the clauses 3.8 and 3.9 of OHSAS 18001:2007.

Best regards from Munich
Goetz

There was an event at the Hanford site a number of years ago:

https://ncsp.tamu.edu/reports/DOE/indexrpt.htm

As I remember, about two dozen employees ended up with OSHA recordable "psychological stress" illnesses.