Action demanded on suicides

A new Hazards magazine campaign is demanding the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) acts on work-related suicides. 


The new initiative, backed by the Hazards Campaign, is encouraging safety reps to send e-postcards to new HSE chief executive Sarah Albon asking her to “remove immediately the current HSE suicide reporting and inspection exemptions”. 


The Hazards Campaign estimates there are around 600 suicides annually due to work pressures, but these are absent from HSE statistics and from its inspection and prevention regimes. 


The e-postcard campaign calls on the HSE to inspect for work-related suicide risks and to investigate and require the reporting of suicides suspected to be work-related.


It sends Albon a clear message: “If the HSE wants to be a relevant regulator, it can no longer ignore the single most deadly, desperate consequence of terror, trauma and tragedy at work.”


The CWU communication workers’ union is also developing a campaign for workplace suicides to be recognised in legislation following a motion carried at its annual conference earlier this year. 


This says: “If any employee takes his or her own life in the workplace, or indicators exist to suggest it may be work related, it should be immediately investigated as a potential work-related suicide with the burden of proof being imposed on the employer to demonstrate that the suicide was not work related.”


www.hazardscampaign.org.uk/suicide

www.hazardscampaign.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Is-your-workplace-killing-you.pdf

http://www.hazards.org/suicide/deathwish.htm

www.cwu.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/CWU-Response-NICE-suicide-prevention-23-05-19.pdf