Posted By PETER GANNAWAY
Has anyone submitted the HSE Standards Questionnaire to an Ethics committee for clearance prior to distribution? If so what was the result? I can find no reference to the HSE already obtaining clearance for the document. There is a school of thought that goes the act of filling the form may itself persuade an individual that they could have work related stress, and therefore the form was a significant contributory factor. Please discuss.

Posted By Jeffrey Watt
Peter

I work in local government and have not had any experience of this being necessary but I am relatively new so my opinion doesn't have much real weight. I comment because local gov seems to be very twitchy about not offending anyone, anyplace , anywhere (that's where the similarity with Martini ends).

IMHO more good than bad will come from carrying out a stress audit. Probably (Carlsberg don't do stress audits but......)

Kind regards

Jeff

Posted By Nigel Hammond
If you do a manual handling risk assessment you would want to know if the people doing the task have back problems. However, the focus is generally on preventative measures such as making sure there is the right equipment and training.

I don't see why stress should be treated differently to other risks. I think it is important to survey the staff. However, the emphasis within the survey should be on finding out whether the management systems for minimising stress are implemented and whether they can be improved - rather than focusing on the individual psychological state to see if they feel stressed. At the IOSH conference one of the HSE speakers suggested that we call it 'Work Organisation' rather than 'stress' which I think is a great idea

Posted By Kieran J Duignan
Peter

I appreciate your difficulty, having both been employed for some years with a local authority in a poorly-managed, poorly-funded service and also having worked with schools at all levels about stress.

In the borough I'm based in, I worked as both an ergonomist and as a counsellor commissioned by a Chief Medical Officer who, despite a very inadequate budget, was a superlative professional whose initiatives made inroads on stress and other critical issues. Part of his success was due to his diplomatic but exttemely stern and well-informed challenges, where necessary in court, to his own line manager, the Director of Personnel.

His successor (after he went on to better paid, better resourced jobs) had much more money and much less competence and credibility. She authorised much more expenditure on stress, a lot of which went on questionnaires that largely measured waste of time and energy. Not a person of her word, she's unforutnately models how a safety specialist makes a mess of an already difficult situation.

This is not to advocate a Don Quixote style for its own sake but to encourage a well-researched, well-informed, imaginative and sustained style of occupational health and safety intervention, likely to gain respect of those with minds inside as well as outwith your organisation.