The MaPS™ Academy
for Managing Psychological Health and Safety takes a proactive, risk-based approach to workers’ mental health and wellbeing in relation to the work they do and the environments they work in.
Welcome to The MaPS™ Academy
Designed by Dr Jacqui Wilmshurst
The newly emerging field of Psychological Health and safety builds on the great work done in recent years in supporting mental health at work.
This is already a legal requirement in many countries, including the UK to risk assess for potential psychological injury and it is now considered best practice globally (see the new WHO guidelines and the ISO45003 standard).
This means you must identify, assess and manage all foreseeable risks to your employees’ psychological and physical health at work.
Our MaPS™ Academy equips and empowers everyone in the organisation; employees, managers, HR and Health & Safety teams, and senior leaders, to understand and carry out their ‘duties of care’, roles and responsibilities in relation to the psychological health & safety of your workforce.
Legislation and Regulation
In relation to Psychological Health & Safety at Work in the UK employers must:
Decide what could harm you in your work and the precautions to stop it. This is part of risk assessment”
In a way that you can understand, tell you how risks are controlled and tell you who is responsible for this.”
Consult with you and your health and safety representatives to protect everyone from workplace harm.
Free of charge, give you the health and safety training you need to do your job
What will I learn?
Using Jacqui’s pioneering 4Ps approach, the MaPS™ academy equips and empowers the whole organisation to be able to conduct and practice, personal and organisational systematic psychological risk assessments.
Many organisations take a reactive approach to “stress” risk assessments, usually due to a psychological injury. This approach would not be acceptable for physical injury.
Providing reactive psychological support, such as counselling or offering generic resilience/stress management training, does not comply fully with this legislation.
Support for such roles must legally consist of appropriately tailored ‘control measures’ to address the specific nature of the hazards and associated risks.
Measures must include training for employees and appropriate resources provided by the employer.
Course Feedback
The differences between identifying risks and hazards - whilst in physical risk assessments its natural to separate the two, this was initially harder when considering risks to psychological wellbeing. Also: the idea that having to comply with a policy / procedure for physical (and possibly even psychological) wellbeing can be a hazard in itself. (This is probably basic to most, but I just hadn't considered it!)