Breakfast Forum newsletter – July 2009

Work-related stress, depression or anxiety are the leading causes of working days lost through work-related injury or ill health, with an estimated 13.8 million days a year lost in 2006/7. Figures from the 2006/7 Survey of Self-reported Work-related illness estimate that each case of stress leads to an average of 30.2 days lost.

So why is stress so prevalent in our working lives and what can employers and employees do to recognise it, prevent it or deal with it? Three specialists in the field were invited to introduce different aspects of the topic and lead the informal discussion at our July Breakfast Forum: Gill Monk of Major Occupational Health Solutions, a company that helps business owners manage employee health and sickness; consultant clinical psychologist LJ Conradie, MD of Psicon; and Dr Les Smith, of Health and Wellbeing UK, occupational health physician who specialises in work-related stress.

This was our last forum before the summer break. Our monthly meetings will resume on Friday 11 September. Litigation and mediation will be the subjects explored in September and October. We hope to invite a tribunal chairman and a representative from ACAS to lead our discussions.

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) defines stress as “The adverse reaction a person has to excessive pressure or other types of demand placed upon them. It is not an illness in itself but if it is prolonged or particularly intense it can lead to physical and/or mental ill health.”

The fact that stress is not an illness, that it is not a diagnosis and cannot be categorised on a sick list is a dilemma for the medical profession. As Les explained, what does a GP put on a medical certificate for an unhappy person?

Yet stress is a fact of life for three in 10 employees in any one year in the 21st century. The speed of life, emails, instant communication, constantly having to do things faster and better, juggling domestic and professional responsibilities, losing the role of the provider when redundancy looms – all of these contribute to the pressure cooker effect and the inability to cope.

For the employer, the impact on productivity and profitability of staff being off work due to stress can be considerable. What members discovered at the forum is that all is not lost, there is help at hand to prevent and manage stress.

Employers have a duty of care to put in place safeguards to limit exposure to workplace stress, and there is a legal requirement for them to undertake a stress risk assessment at work. Helpful documents are available, such as the H&S Stress Management Standards which looks at pressure and relationships at work, Shift's Line Managers' Resource, a practical guide for managing and supporting people with experience of mental health problems in the workplace.

All our speakers emphasised that stress at work often also means stress outside work. Stress management courses look at physical, psychological, social, economic and environmental wellbeing. If one of these is out of sync, it will affect the others.

Resilience training is an important tool for coping with stressful jobs. The jobs cannot change, so we have to be resilient, manage our energy throughout the day, manage our sleep patterns, periods of activity and times for breaks, and so become a “corporate” athlete. We must also make time to build up resilience in relationships, whether at home or at work.

A popular and effective treatment is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), which is recognised by a number of eminent psychologists and by the British Occupational Health Research Foundation. This is not passive counselling, because it targets specific goals and is a form of education – learning to be in control rather than talking about external control ruling our lives, understanding the differences between thought and feeling, formulating the reasons for stress symptoms before being able to address them.

If you worry, you die;
If you don’t worry, you die;
So why worry?


We wish our members and readers a stress-free summer.