HSE says there are six key factors which, if not properly managed, are associated with poor health, lower productivity and increased accident and sickness absence rates and urges employers to review the stress-causing factors in their workplaces and the work that their employees do.
According to the HSE, stress, depression or anxiety account for 51% of all work-related ill health cases and 55% of all working days lost due to work-related ill health. Stress impacts on all sectors and businesses of all sizes and employers have a legal duty to protect employees from stress at work by doing a risk assessment and acting on it.
The HSE suggests that evidence shows there are six key factors which, if not properly managed, are associated with poor health, lower productivity and increased accident and sickness absence rates.
The six key factors are:
Rob Vondy, Head of Stress and Mental Health Policy at HSE, says: “It’s well known that stress can make you ill. We know that work-related stress depression and anxiety has increased in recent years, and the last year has presented new challenges that have never been faced before, and which may affect the workplaces of the UK for some time to come.
“Good communication is vital as stress affects people differently – what stresses one person may not affect another. If you don’t understand the problem or its extent, tackling it will be more difficult. Factors like skills and experience, age or disability may all affect whether an employee can cope. People feel stress when they can’t cope with the pressures or demands put on them, either in work or other outside issues. Start talking to your colleagues about any issues now – the earlier a problem is tackled the less impact it will have.
“Employers should match demands to employees’ skills and knowledge. Recognising the signs of stress will help employers to take steps to prevent, reduce and manage stress in the workplace. Healthy and safe work and workplaces are good for business and good for workers.”
In a recent interview with the Safety & Health Podcast, The HSE’s Senior Psychologist, Peter Kelly, said he believes that there are ‘three parallel pandemics going on’. “I think one is a global recession, which is a pandemic it’s in its own right with loss of jobs, which we know impacts people’s mental health. We have an influenza pandemic, with people going through COVID-19 and then we have a tidal wave of mental health issues happening, where people are experiencing significant levels of mental distress.”
Listen to the interview with Peter in full, below…
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Brilliant as, at least 58% of DSE operators, HSE Better Display Screen RR 561 2007, have been waiting since 1993 DSE Reg’s for someone in elf-an-safety to mitigate the visual stress and debilitating eye-strain caused by prolonged use of standard, out of the box, sub-optimally calibrated display screens, not even compliant with the 1998 PUWER Act and now still in the dark about the BSI 2019 ISO 30071.1 DSE Colour Contrast Calibration accessibility standard mitigating the risk of early onset vision stress, myopic and asthenopic monocular adaptations scaled by the WHO in 2016 as a Global Pandemic.
Trouble is, the HSE in 2017, just a year after the WHO ICD-10, has again put off a review of the 2007 Meta Medical Review RR 561 due in 2020 to 2022 ignoring the regardless of the BSI 2019 ISO 30071.1, making the excuse that only an advisory and not enforceable accepting the disabilities caused would qualify under the 2010 Equality Act as lasting up to 12 months or longer.