NewEra helps healthcare organisations understand those conditions, manage serious and psychosocial risk and design healthier, safer systems around the realities of care.
Caring work is still work.
Healthcare is different from many other industries.
The work is deeply human.
Patients are not plant.
Care cannot always stop when conditions become difficult.
Demand can change without warning.
People may be distressed, confused, frightened or aggressive.
Clinical priorities can compete.
Workers continually adapt.
But the fundamental WHS question remains:
What conditions are we asking people to work within?
Understanding those conditions is the beginning of prevention.
Worker safety and patient care share a system.
Healthcare often separates:
- Patient safety.
- Worker safety.
- Quality.
- Wellbeing.
- Workforce.
- Operations.
Yet the same conditions can influence all of them.
- Staffing.
- Workload.
- Fatigue.
- Equipment.
- Communication.
- Role clarity.
- Leadership.
- Work design.
- Information.
- Interruptions.
- Environmental design.
- Organisational change.
When these conditions deteriorate, several outcomes can deteriorate with them.
Better work supports safer care.
Look upstream.
Healthcare responses to worker health can become focused on the individual.
- Resilience.
- Mindfulness.
- Self-care.
- Wellbeing programs.
- Employee assistance.
- These supports can be valuable.
But they cannot compensate for poorly designed work.
If the exposure comes from:
- Excessive workload.
- Poor role clarity.
- Inadequate staffing.
- Low job control.
- Violence.
- Fatigue.
- Poor organisational change.
- Unmanageable emotional demands.
Then prevention needs to look at those conditions too.
Support people.
Change the work where you can.
Psychosocial hazards are work hazards.
Psychosocial risk isn't simply about whether somebody feels stressed.
It is about the design, organisation and management of work and the conditions in which work occurs.
Healthcare can involve exposure to:
- High job demands.
- Low job control.
- Poor support.
- Role conflict.
- Poor organisational change.
- Inadequate recognition.
- Remote or isolated work.
- Violence and aggression.
- Bullying.
- Harassment.
- Traumatic events.
- High emotional demands.
- Fatigue.
- Poor organisational justice.
- These hazards can interact.
Understand the exposure before choosing the intervention.
Don't measure wellbeing
when you need to measure work.
An engagement survey can tell you something.
A wellbeing survey can tell you something else.
But if the objective is psychosocial risk management, the organisation needs to understand exposure to hazards in the work.
Ask:
- What aspects of the work can cause harm?
- Who is exposed?
- How often?
- Under what conditions?
- What controls currently exist?
- How effective are they?
- What needs to change?
- Measure the conditions.
- Not just the consequences.
- Healthy work is designed.
Healthy work considers the relationship between:
DEMANDS
What does the work require?