MENTAL HEALTH & STRESS
MENTAL HEALTH MATTERS
Psychological health should not be separated from occupational health and safety, says Dale Jones, Technical Director at SafeContractor.
Workplace health and safety has traditionally focused on risks we can see: machinery, hazardous substances, slips and trips, work at height and unsafe equipment. But some factors that influence health and safe performance are far less visible.
Work-related stress and fatigue can affect concentration, judgement and decision-making. Burnout is recognised by the World Health Organization (WHO) as an occupational phenomenon resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. These outcomes are often treated primarily as wellbeing concerns, rather than prompting employers to examine and control the psychosocial hazards in the way work is designed, organised and managed.
When someone is affected by excessive pressure or fatigue, the consequences can extend beyond their health and wellbeing. Reduced concentration, slower reactions and impaired decision-making can contribute to errors, incidents and near misses, particularly in safety- critical work. The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) estimates that 964,000 workers in Great Britain suffered work-related stress, depression or anxiety in 2024/25. This represented 52% of workers reporting work-related ill health and accounted for 22.1m working days lost.
This is why psychological health should not be separated from occupational health and safety. Employers should identify psychosocial hazards, assess the risks they create and implement controls as part of their wider health and safety arrangements. Stress, fatigue and burnout may be outcomes of poorly controlled work-related hazards; they are not interchangeable terms for the hazards themselves.
LOOKING BEYOND PHYSICAL HAZARDS
Psychosocial hazards can arise from excessive demands, low control, inadequate support, poor workplace relationships, unclear or conflicting roles, and poorly managed organisational change. Fatigue may also arise
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from long hours, shift work, demanding schedules, insufficient staffing or inadequate opportunities for sleep, rest and recovery.
These risks may not be immediately obvious, but their impact can be significant. They can affect an employee’s ability to remain alert, respond appropriately to hazards and carry out their role safely.
For employers, this means psychosocial hazards should be considered through the same systematic risk-management process used for physical hazards. Excessive demands, low control and inadequate recovery may not be visible in the same way as unsafe equipment or hazardous substances, but they can still affect health and whether work is carried out safely.
“THE CONDITIONS IN WHICH PEOPLE WORK CAN THEMSELVES CREATE OR INCREASE RISK.”
This does not mean replacing traditional health and safety measures with wellbeing initiatives. Rather, it means recognising that the two are interconnected and that the conditions in which people work can themselves create or increase risk.
MAKING PSYCHOSOCIAL RISK PART OF RISK MANAGEMENT
Employers have a legal duty to assess the risk of stress- related ill health arising from work activities and to take reasonably practicable measures to control that risk. HSE’s Management Standards provide a recognised framework for doing this: prepare the organisation, identify the risk factors and who may be harmed, evaluate the risks, record findings, act, and monitor and review the controls.
This should form part of an organisation’s wider approach to managing health and safety, rather than
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