NHS Employers must meet Health and Safety Executive targets by 2010
NHS targets
By 2010 all employers must:
- reduce the incidence of work-related ill health by 20 per cent
- reduce the number of working days lost through work-related ill health by 30 per cent
- ensure that people who are not working due to ill health or disability are given opportunities for rehabilitation back into work, or are offered opportunities to prepare for and find employment.
Employers also have legal duties with regard to protecting their staff from work-related stress.
What managers should do
Skills and knowledge
Managers at all levels need the skills to be able to tackle work-related stress both personally and among their staff. If staff do suffer from stress, managers should have the skills to manage the consequences.
Managers must:
- understand the legal implications of stress in the workplace
- be able to comply with health and safety law around stress
- be able to recognise signs of stress in their staff
- know how to approach an employee showing signs of stress, listen to them and maintain confidentiality
- know what internal and external advice and guidance is available to staff
- recognise how they themselves may be contributing to the stress levels of staff and how they could change.
Why take action?
The legal requirements
Reducing the effects of workplace stress is the legal duty of all employers under health and safety law.
The Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1974 states that 'every employer should ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health, safety and welfare at work of all their employees'.
The Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 require employers to adopt modern risk management techniques.
Policies
All NHS organisations need to implement stress policies.
The Health and Safety Executive has an example of a stress policy on their website. HSE issued management standards of good practice, which employers can use to help measure their performance when tackling the things that affect stress in the workplace.
As well as specific policies to tackle stress, other organisational policies and practices play a part in preventing stress. For example, there should be fair and open grievance and complaints policies, zero tolerance on bullying, no condoning of confrontational managers and also good internal communications
Last reviewed 18 Jul 2008
