Poster Round Two National Suicide Prevention Conference 2026

Systemic approaches to psychosocial hazards and suicide prevention in the workplace  (#54)

Clayton Spence 1
  1. Suicide Prevention Australia, Sydney, NSW, Australia

Over recent years the Workplace Health and Safety legislation has been strengthened to ensure psychosocial safety is given equal consideration to physical safety. Many organisations have scrambled to grapple with this, and many have begun implementing strategies. Often these strategies have been limited to “we have an EAP”, or “let’s run some resilience training”. Single pronged and “throw spaghetti at a wall” approaches to suicide prevention and psychosocial safety have the potential to do more harm than good, even when the individual approach, training course, or service offering, are evidence-informed and good in themselves. Systems and complexity theories reminds us that life is not simple and cannot be understood in terms of simple “cause and effect”. For example, Quinata1 talks about the ‘pervasive variability of causal effects’, describing human behaviour as interactive and interdependent. Applying Bowen’s2 family systems theory to organisations we can see that change is not linear, organisations are adaptive and self-organising, and despite our best-efforts order and change is an emergent property of individual interactions, meaning that there are often unforeseen consequences of even the best intended change programs. For organisations and communities seeking to ensure psychosocial safety and prevent suicide this approach reminds us that there is no “magic button”, but that we should consider a systemic approach to develop strategies that are wholistic and responsive rather than siloed and static. There is a place for training and EAPs, but within a broader systemic framework. For this reason, Suicide Prevention Australia has developed a number of Competency Frameworks that enable a systemic approach that are responsive and comprehensive. As a peak body, Suicide Prevention Australia, is best placed to develop frameworks that bring together training providers, service providers, and other supports from amongst our membership, and engage the voice of those with lived experience, to allow a truly collaborative, systemic approach to the complexity of workplace health and safety, psychosocial safety, and suicide prevention. This paper will explore the systemic approach taken by Suicide Prevention Australia through the five competency frameworks currently available.