New British suicide prevention standard welcomed by construction sector

Construction workers are four times more likely to die by suicide than the national average. In the past decade 7,000 construction workers have taken their own lives with men, particularly those in midlife,  disproportionately affected. And while progress has been made on many health and safety fronts, suicide remains a critical issue for the construction sector. It is timely, therefore, that BSI has opened a public consultation on BS 30480 – a new standard aimed specifically at suicide prevention. We’ll speak to a health and safety expert about the new standard and how it helps. 

Construction Magazine reports on research by On The Tools, the UK’s largest community of tradespeople, which shows that 73% of the country’s 2.1 million construction workers have been affected by mental illness. The industry has long warned about the drivers of this problem – long  hours, job insecurity and a “macho” culture that discourages people from speaking up. Against that backdrop it’s no surprise that the new British Standard, BS 30480, is attracting particular interest in the construction sector. 

While construction may be at higher risk, the issues driving suicide risk are not unique to that sector. The new British Standard is designed to apply across all workplaces, large and small, recognising that psychosocial risks exist wherever people work. That brings HR and health and safety professionals together, with the standard offering a common framework for both functions to address the problem in a consistent way.

BSI’s website sets out the scope of the new standard. They say: ‘This British Standard is of use to managers, human resources teams, health and safety teams, occupational health teams, as well as those in organizational health and well-being, and diversity and inclusion. It is also for those workers who are responsible for managing performance, workload, mental health well-being and work environments.’ 

So clearly it is something HR teams should know about so let’s hear more about it. Earlier I caught up with Jonathan Cowlan who joined me by phone from Glasgow. So what’s the aim of this new standard?

Jonathan Cowlan: “BSI will come with various development of standards and across all sorts of things, quality, environment, health and safety being a part of that and the aim of the standard, I guess, is to give organisations something to hang their hat on, to say you can build this topic into your current approaches. So many organisations will be accredited to existing standards for health and safety, psychological safety, risk, and environment for example. The idea will be that you can take the requirements of this standard and bolt them onto your existing management systems, but there will be specific things about the suicide topic, and that tends to be how organisations approach things. So I think from a regulator’s perspective the things which are in that draft standard will be looked at as industry good practice.”

Joe Glavina: “So what’s in the new standard, Jon, to help HR and health and safety professionals to help protect against suicide?”

Jonathan Cowlan: “The first bit is the prevention angle and that’s obviously some of the stuff we’ve been talking about, about looking at the risks within the workplace and how you can support people to have those risks minimised by good management but also, obviously, to assist with identification as well, which I think is a big issue and no one, frankly, is going have the answer to that. I think one thing to say about that sort of identification of management systems, I think I would expect those to look quite different in different types of sectors and organisations because of the different types of pressures people may be under. Engineering and manufacturing facilities are a lot different from working from an emergency service, for example. So I think it’s very much that although you’ve got this framework, the practical stuff will be led by industry standards and what seems to be appropriate. You’ve obviously then got dealing with things when they do come up in terms of what are we going to do about it? What process are we going to follow? In the standard, the draft, there’s a reference to a toolkit for employers, but that’s all it says. So the toolkit is obviously under development. That will be really important because that will be ‘these are the things you need to do within the context of your organisation’ and you’ll follow those and not forgetting, at the end of the cycle, dealing with people that may have been affected, unfortunately, by a suicide within their workplace and looking at counselling measures, learning lessons and dealing with the individuals very close to that, and liaising with people like the family. I think those are all very sensible things to have in place but towards the far end of that process, obviously. That’s very emotional and sensitive territory and I think you’ve got to feel that as you go case by case. I don’t think you’re going to just have a process that deals with it.”

Joe Glavina: “Is there employees should do now before publication of this new standard?”

Jonathan Cowlan: “I think if you’re an employer and you’ve already got accreditation to other standards, talk to your external surveillance organisation about that now. That’s certainly something that normally happens with these standards, and you can do that in advance. It will be interesting to see, from a surveillance perspective, who is deemed to be competent to actually judge these standards that employers put things in because, again, it’s not typical surveillance type territory when you’re dealing with suicide prevention and management. So again, I would expect to see HR experience coming into that very much, just as much as health and safety.”

Joe Glavina: “You mentioned surveillance. Can you explain what you mean by that.”

Jonathan Cowlan: ”So when you’re talking about external surveillance, if you become accredited to a British Standard you have to have an external body come in and make sure you’re doing your homework, basically, and make sure your systems are working. So they will come in to start with  and they’ll probably do a gap analysis, and then make sure you’re in a good place to say, yes, we give you accreditation and then depending on the size of your organisation and what you do, they will come up with a surveillance plan on an annual basis to check that you’re doing it on the tin, and we’ll pick bits of your organisation, or location, or something like that, and you keep getting your certification. So that’s what I’m talking about there. So you’ve got an external, for want of a better word, ‘expert’ coming in to make sure that’s delivering and obviously the benefit of that to employers for this standard and others is that that does not guarantee legal compliance, and they’ll say that on their reports, but it does mean you can have confidence in the type of things you’re doing, and if you’re applying those consistently across your organisation.”

Joe Glavina: “Finally, Jon, anything else to add?”

Jonathan Cowlan: “I think start thinking about it now and I guess there are two points I’d bring up. Interestingly, the HSE does now have a suicide prevention page on their website. It talks about the stuff I’ve talked about, and it’s not too much about suicide, but there’s a clear message there that they recognize that there will be work related elements to this quite often. I think the other thing I would bring to organisations’ attention is that we are starting to see in coroner’s inquests, certainly in England and Wales, where the family have said, well, we think there could be a work-related element to this suicide and then obviously a coroner can direct, by their reported mechanisms, that steps need to be taken in terms of future prevention and also the HSE regularly turn up at coroner’s inquests. So you can see this becoming more in the focus of the regulator because it has to be in that mode and, again, I think that the things which organisationally people need to address and could contribute to those things will change but they need to be aware of them. So an example would be longer working hours driving for work, if there’s an element there and it pushes someone close to the edge and it doesn’t end well, you know, what is your occupational road risk policy, and what do you expect of people to do in those circumstances and manage their workload? You can see that as an example where a regulator may be interested in traditional safety, but also the topics in the draft British Standard.”

Last week Jon talked to this programme about BS 30480. As mentioned, it’s the UK’s first workplace standard dedicated to suicide prevention and we expect it soon, around November according to the BSI’s website. That programme is called ‘New British suicide prevention standard imminent as confidence gap exposed’ and it is available for viewing now from the Out-Law website.

- Link to HRNews programme: ‘New British suicide prevention standard imminent as confidence gap exposed’