Psychological injury is rapidly becoming an injury category of increasing presence and relevance in Australia as our awareness and the norms of acceptance, change.
The impact of psychological injury is significant because there is typically delayed recovery with a slow return to work thereby increasing claim liabilities and the resulting premium pressures.
Comcare; the Federal Workplace Insurer; recently released the following statistics for the financial year 2013/14 that demonstrate this impact.
The annual claim costs for psychological injury in the Australian Public Service approached $80m to represent near 20% of the total $410m spent on claims in FY 2013/14. Trauma from bullying or psychological violence formed the largest proportion of these injury claims; with 39% from bullying or harassment by fellow colleagues. Each claim had cost on average $342K thereby demonstrating the slow recovery that typifies psychological injury and importantly, the number of claims has soared by almost 90% since 2009. Clearly, our awareness and the norms of acceptance have changed.
Body stressing remains the leading cause of compensation claims and continues to grow. Comparatively, the average claim had cost $129K and this is significantly less than psychological injury. Nevertheless, it demonstrates the effect of lower consequence yet higher likelihood events – that they add up!
As a response, Comcare have developed a campaign called Stand Up to reduce sedentary workplace behaviour. This is a terrific initiative and a very necessary to the accumulative effects of sedentary work and our ageing workforce. What is equally required though, is a measured response to psychological injury- taken from a team and leadership perspective. This is naturally a complex area as it is representative of a wicked problem – a problem that has a multitude of inputs.
Enhance Solutions have looked at psychological wellness holistically, from a risk vulnerability and resilience perspective and we have developed a terrific new diagnostic that we’re calling Safe Design for People. It defines the factors which promote organisation resilience thereby identifying the specific risk factors (or vulnerabilities) that give rise to psychological injury. From this, a plan is mapped that is specific to the workplace for implementation and ongoing monitoring.
We’d love to talk to you about it!
http://www.canberratimes.com.au/national/public-service/revealed-the-cost-of-bullying-and-violence-in-the-australian-public-service-20150729-gimwfr.html