Every October, Canada’s Healthy Workplace Month® encourages organizations to promote employee well-being by focusing on mental and physical wellness, and creating supportive workplace culture, and organizational resilience. Organizations that strive to be trauma informed are fundamental to achieving this goal. We already know that focusing on individual protective factors alone isn’t sufficient. While work-life balance, training/professional development, wellness activities, team building, and other strategies to mitigate secondary stress are important, if the systems or organizations in which we work are not trauma-informed, burnout is inevitable.
Daphne Penrose, MSW RSW is a local consultant whose work focuses on workplace psychological health and safety education, legislative literacy & organizational consultation. Here is what she said about advancing psychological health and safety in the workplace.
Protecting Those Who Care
Every day, professionals across Manitoba dedicate their working lives to supporting people through some of life’s most difficult circumstances. Whether working in health care, child welfare, social services, education, policing, paramedicine, firefighting, emergency response, or other frontline and community-based professions, their responsibilities can involve repeated exposure to trauma, suffering, grief, crisis, and human distress. This work is profoundly important, meaningful, and essential to the well-being and safety of our communities. Yet the cumulative psychological impact of these occupational exposures is not always fully recognized or understood. We have developed considerable knowledge about trauma and its effects on the people receiving care and services, but have we extended that same understanding and compassion to the people providing them? Recognizing the psychological demands of these professions does not diminish the value of the work. Rather, it acknowledges the importance of protecting the people entrusted to carry it out.
Cumulative Harm
When repeated exposure to potentially traumatic experiences is an expected part of someone’s professional responsibilities, the risk of cumulative occupational psychological harm becomes foreseeable. When risks are foreseeable, we have an opportunity to identify, assess, and work toward preventing them. Individual wellness initiatives, counselling, employee assistance programs, and resilience-building strategies remain important and valuable support. However, protecting psychological health also requires us to look beyond the individual and consider the organizational conditions in which the work takes place. How do we structure workloads, provide supervision, respond to psychological hazards, support workers, and create environments where people feel safe to speak openly about the impact of their work?
Meaningful Change
Meaningful change does not always require significant new resources. Sometimes it begins with greater awareness, different conversations, and thoughtful changes to existing organizational practices. Becoming a psychologically safer trauma-informed organization is not about assigning blame. It is about recognizing shared responsibilities and exploring what we can do differently to better protect the people who serve our communities.
Opportunities for Prevention
Daphne’s work is centered on advancing this understanding and helping translate it into meaningful opportunities for prevention through three interconnected areas:
- Education and Awareness: Providing professionals and leaders with the language and understanding to recognize cumulative occupational trauma, psychological hazards, and their potential impacts on individuals, organizations, and communities.
- Psychological Safety and Legislative Literacy: Aiming to make the occupational health and safety landscape more accessible, including the responsibilities associated with recognizing and addressing workplace psychological risks.
- Organizational Prevention and Implementation: Helping to translate this knowledge into practice through psychological hazard identification and risk assessment, examination of workplace practices, leadership development, and trauma-informed organizational approaches.
Together, these efforts aim to create healthier, safer, and more sustainable workplaces by shifting the focus from responding to psychological harm after it occurs to preventing it, while better protecting those who dedicate their lives to caring for and protecting others (D. Penrose, 2026).
If you would like to connect with Daphne, she can be reached at daphnepenrose55@gmail.com.
