UTS21440 Chap.10 Psychological Health, Safety and Cultural Safety
Psychological Health, Safety and Cultural Safety
Week 8 of 21440 Management Skills at University of Technology Sydney is where workplace wellbeing becomes a duty rather than an argument. Under Australian work health and safety law a person conducting a business must manage psychosocial risks at work, and an organisation must also build workplace practices that are culturally safe and make inclusive practice possible.
The chapter works through the regulator's definition of a psychosocial hazard, its fourteen named hazards, the four step risk management process and the reliability ranking that places training last, then turns to cultural safety, its four term continuum, seven principles and three domains of assessment.
What this chapter covers
- 01
The legal frame: managing psychosocial risk, and developing culturally safe practice
- 02
What counts as a psychosocial hazard, in four stated categories
- 03
The harms named, psychological and physical
- 04
Fourteen named hazards, and four of their published definitions
- 05
Why hazards are assessed collectively rather than one at a time
- 06
The four step process, with consultation supporting every step
- 07
The duty stated as a sequence, from identify to review
- 08
Six matters to have regard to when choosing controls
- 09
Why administrative controls are the least reliable
- 10
Cultural safety defined, and the four term continuum
- 11
Seven principles, three domains, and how a cultural audit is conducted
Assessing an organisational response against the psychosocial duty
- +1No identification step. Complaints and a report are signals rather than a hazard identification exercise, and the duty begins with identifying reasonably foreseeable hazards, with consultation supporting every step of the process.
- +1The response is entirely administrative. The code states that administrative controls provide the lowest level of protection and should be considered last and used in combination with more effective measures, and nothing here eliminates or minimises the hazards present.
- +1The hazards are being treated separately. The code requires collective assessment because hazards interact or combine, and workload alongside bullying is exactly a combination case.
- +1State what the duty would require instead: identification with consultation, assessment of the hazards together, at least one control aimed at the design or the systems of work, and a review to confirm the controls remain effective over time.
Key terms
- Psychosocial hazard
- A hazard arising from or in relation to the design or management of work, the working environment, plant at a workplace, or workplace interactions or behaviours, which may cause psychological and physical harm.
- Low job control
- A named hazard describing little control over how or when a job is done, limited ability to adapt or adopt efficiencies, tightly scripted or machine paced work, and prescriptive processes that leave no room for skill and judgement.
- Poor organisational justice
- A named hazard covering management decisions, and the way policies get applied, when these are inconsistent, unfair, discriminatory or inequitable; poor procedural justice sits inside it.
- Lack of role clarity
- A named hazard covering uncertainty, frequent changes, conflicting roles and ambiguous responsibilities and expectations.
- Administrative control
- A control that works through procedure, training or policy rather than by changing the work itself. The code states these are among the least reliable controls, providing the lowest level of protection, and should be considered last.
- Approved code of practice
- A document approved under the work health and safety legislation and admissible in court proceedings, which a court may treat as evidence of what is currently known about a given hazard, about the risk it carries, about how that risk is assessed, and about how it is controlled.
- Cultural safety
- A setting in which a person's identity, who they are and what they need, is neither attacked nor questioned nor treated as absent, and which rests on respect, understanding, knowledge and experience that both sides hold. At work the term reaches the physical setting, the relationships and the systems, so that people can take part and express their culture without meeting racism or discrimination.
- Cultural awareness
- The first tier of the continuum, focused on lifting what one person knows and notices about how life is lived in cultures other than their own.
- Cultural competence
- The fourth term of the continuum, described as occurring on a continuum of education and improvement rather than as an end state, since it can shift with staff turnover, organisational change and cultural growth.
- Self determination
- One of seven principles of the cultural safety framework, expressed as Aboriginal led rather than Aboriginal consulted, on the basis that cultural safety must be determined by Aboriginal people.
Psychological Health, Safety and Cultural Safety FAQ
Why is this material in a positive psychology subject?
Because it is the other half of the same problem. The rest of the subject argues for wellbeing on evidence, which makes it persuasive but optional. This week the same subject matter arrives as a legal duty, which changes what a manager is choosing about, and it also supplies the sharpest evidence for the argument the subject keeps making about cheap interventions substituting for expensive ones.
What is the most useful thing to take from the code?
The list of fourteen hazards, because it is a diagnostic checklist written by a regulator rather than a consultant. Four of the fourteen are the dimensions the integrated model named as work related risk factors, which makes the connection between the two weeks explicit, and the requirement to assess hazards collectively is the part most organisations miss.
Why does the code say training is the least reliable control?
Because administrative controls and protective equipment act on how a person behaves within a hazard rather than on the hazard itself, so they depend on compliance, memory and attention every single time. A wellbeing workshop, a resilience course and a policy update are all administrative controls, which is why the code says they should be considered last and used in combination with more effective measures.
What is the difference between cultural awareness and cultural safety?
Awareness raises an individual's knowledge of other cultures, and sensitivity adds self reflection on personal attitudes and how they affect behaviour. Safety is defined as focusing on the operations of organisations and systems, and lends itself to behavioural and environmental adjustments that allow for cultural values.
The shift at the third tier is from the person to the system, which is why a training completion rate is not evidence about safety.
How should I approach the reading question for this week?
The question asks what organisations can do to centre Indigenous voices, so the answer has to be about organisational action rather than personal attitude. The seven principles make ready made headings, and the strongest of them for this question is the distinction between Aboriginal led and Aboriginal consulted, because it is the difference between centring a voice and collecting one.
Read the report itself for the truths it sets out.
Assessment move
Learn the fourteen hazards well enough to recognise them in a description, because that recognition is what turns a vague complaint into an analysable case. Then learn the four step process and the reliability ranking, since together they let you assess almost any organisational response in four sentences.
For the cultural safety half, the examinable distinction is the tier at which each term operates, and the entry for this week carries a named learning objective and a scored rubric criterion, so it is the one journal entry that cannot be written thinly. Read the set report itself rather than any summary of it.
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