Traumatic events

The first step is to identify hazards in your place of work. This means looking at everything from the work environment to work tasks, how they’re carried out, and the way work is designed and managed.

Typical situations that may lead to workers experiencing stress due to exposure to traumatic events include:

• working in certain areas or occupations (e.g. health care, community work, counselling, defence, funeral services, child protective services, correction officers, legal services, high-risk work where injuries may occur)
• responding to emergencies (e.g. incidents requiring response by emergency service workers including police, emergency health workers, firefighters, ambulance officers and triple-zero call receivers)
• providing care to those experiencing a traumatic event, listening to, viewing or reading detailed descriptions of traumatic events experienced by others (e.g. rape crisis or child safety officers, lawyers or immigration officers, workplace incident investigators).

Sometimes, a worker may avoid reporting concerns because:

• it’s thought to be ‘part of the job’ and nothing can be done about it
• the worker believes that only ‘serious incidents or issues’ are to be reported
• there’s a belief that nothing will happen if they report
• the worker believes they will be blamed for not being able to handle the job
• the reporting process is time-consuming and complex
• the workplace culture encourages “just getting on with it”.

To determine if exposure to traumatic events is a potential hazard in your place of work:

• talk with health and safety representatives, health and safety committees and workers
• walk through and inspect your place of work, including how people interact
• review workers’ compensation claims
• refer to industry standards and guidelines
• review the hazard and incident reports, exit reports and complaints.

A risk assessment involves thinking about what could happen if someone is exposed to a hazard (the consequence of exposure) and the likelihood of it happening.

Psychosocial hazards may interact or combine to increase the overall psychosocial risk so need to be considered together.

A risk assessment can help you figure out:

• the severity of a risk
• whether any effective control measures are in place
• what actions you can take to control this risk
• how quickly you should act.

To determine the likelihood that someone will be harmed by exposure to traumatic events, ask yourself:

• has it happened before, either in this place of work or somewhere else?
• if it has happened, how often does it happen?

To determine the possible consequences, ask yourself:

• will it cause minor or serious injury, or death?

After the risks have been identified and assessed, you'll need to control them. Risk control measures should be selected on the basis of highest protection and most reliability.

Control measures

• Eliminating the risk
  The most effective control measure is to eliminate the hazard and associated risk, for example by removing the potential for workers or others to be exposed to traumatic events.
  • Where you are unable to eliminate the hazard, you must identify ways to ensure you are managing it in a way that minimises risks to health and safety.
• Minimising the risk
  If it’s not reasonably practicable to eliminate the hazard, the risk should be minimised by using a range of control measures, for example:
  • Rotate roles or activities to ensure workers have adequate breaks from roles which are likely to involve exposure to traumatic events.
  • Introduce file flagging processes on potentially distressing files or cases to avoid inadvertent exposure to distressing content.
  • 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.
• Using administrative controls
  You must also use administrative controls if there is still a risk after you’ve tried to reduce it with other control measures. Administrative controls protect your workers by working in ways that reduce their exposure to a hazard, for example:
  • Ensure procedures are in place to respond to critical incidents including practical support for workers, counselling/professional support services, appropriate information about available resources.
  • Ensure systems are in place to regularly monitor workers’ exposure to traumatic events and workers’ psychological health.
  • Design procedures to support workers in response to exposure to traumatic events.
  • Ensure managers are provided with adequate information, training and instruction in how to respond and manage reported exposure of workers, including how to identify early signs of distress or psychological injury and how to offer support if required.
  • Ensure workers are provided with information on how to report exposure to traumatic events and other procedures in relation to support options available.

You may need to use a combination of these control measures to meet your responsibilities under WHS laws. Refer to the Managing the risk of psychosocial hazards at work Code of Practice 2022 for more information.

Risk management should be an ongoing process in your business, and you should review your control measures regularly. Don’t wait until something goes wrong.

In some situations, WHS legislation requires you to review controls.

These are:

• when the control measure is not effective in controlling the risk
• before a change that might give rise to a new risk
• when you identify a new hazard or risk
• when consultation with workers indicates a review is needed
• when the dynamic and complexity of your business changes, for a new supervisor or worker
• after a health and safety representative requests a review.

A review of risk control measures should be undertaken after incidents or complaints involving exposure to traumatic events.

A review of risk control measures can include an examination of:

• the physical work environment
• work systems and procedures
• worker training and information
• the consultation processes in your place of work.