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National Policies for Mental Health

Dollard, M. F., & Winefield, A. H. (2002). 'Mental health: Overemployment, underemployment, unemployment and healthy jobs.' In L. Morrow, I. Verins, & E. Willis (Eds.), Mental health and work: Issues and perspectives. Adelaide: Auseinet: The Australian Network for Promotion, Prevention and Early Intervention for Mental Health.

Dollard and Winefield advise that the National Occupational Health and Safety Symposium on the Occupational Health and Safety Implications of Stress in Melbourne 2001 (Dollard, 2001) advanced a number of key policy implications from the evidence base, a philosophical framework and processes to deal with new stressors as they emerge.

From that symposium, the authors advance the following policies that could be pursued at a national level.

Providing further organisational support and funds to enable greater dialogue among all stakeholders, and to enable meaningful national engagement and participation in international discussion about work stress and its solutions.
Convening further national conferences and workshops on work stress in which government, social partners, workers and researchers can participate.
Undertaking research comparing Australian regulations, policies and practices with those in other countries (Kompier, DeGier, Smulders & Draaisma, 1994).
Promoting whole-organisational approaches, healthy organisations, sustainable organisations and ethical action.
Developing a national network of stress researchers.
Establishing a national monitoring system for identifying risk factors and risk groups in the working populations (Kompier et al., 1994).
Making a systematic attempt to benchmark organisational performance and work stress management, so that intervention efforts can be more economically focused (Kompier et al., 1994).
Making work stress research a priority for the National Health and Medical Research Council.
Supporting research that promotes positive or productive aspects of work such as morale (eg Hart & Cotton, 2002) and engagement (Maslach, 1998), and explores emerging issues (eg emotional and cognitive demands) (Houkes, Jannsen, de Jonge & Nijhuis, 2001), and workplace violence, its causes and consequences.
Developing more comprehensive national databases (eg on the National Occupational Health and Safety Commission's database of workers, compensation statistics include figures for work stress but there is no breakdown of the data to reflect public versus private sector experience, and some jurisdictions' data is omitted).
Conducting more research on the effect of new legislation on rates of acceptance or rejection of stress claims.
Systematically identifying gaps between research evidence and policy.
Providing more education and training on work stress and interventions for all stakeholders to enable fuller involvement in participatory processes for the prevention of work stress.
- Encouraging Australian organisations to use best practice principles in implementing interventions. Conduct an evidence-based meta-analysis of Australian work stress prevention and interventions.
- Having government, social partners and researchers participate in television programs and videos on identification and prevention of stress at work.
- Developing a clearing house for all relevant information and other educational materials to be placed on the internet.

(From Dollard & Winefield, 2002, pp. 28-29)

This page is linked to the following pages:
Mental Health and Work
Promoting Wellbeing at Work
Organisational Policies for Mental Health
Effective Research Programs