About Workplace Mental Health
There has been a great deal in the media over the last few weeks about safeguarding, and about what organisations owe people who are vulnerable. Most of the commentary has been about process. Very little of it has been about the person at the centre.
The case that has drawn the most attention is the resignation of a Cambridge professor in early August, with the university opening an investigation into the circumstances of his appointment. I am not going to comment on the allegations. They are unresolved, and it is not my field. What is my field is the question underneath them, and it is one that applies to every employer, not just to universities.
When a person is at the centre of a storm like that, who is responsible for their safety?
Predictable harm is your risk
Peel away the specifics and there is a pattern that recurs in every sector. An allegation is made. A process starts. The individual is suspended, or steps back, or simply becomes untouchable inside their own organisation. Coverage builds. Colleagues stop calling because nobody knows what to say. And the institution, advised to limit contact and protect the integrity of the process, goes quiet.
Every one of those steps is understandable on its own. Together they produce isolation, at precisely the moment when isolation is most dangerous.
In safety we have a word for the thing that decides whether a risk is yours. The word is foreseeable. If the harm was predictable, the duty is engaged, and it does not matter that the harm is psychological and reputational rather than physical. Regulation 3 of the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 requires employers to assess risks to the health of their employees. Somebody who is under investigation, suspended, and being written about in national newspapers is not an ordinary employee in an ordinary week. That is a risk assessment waiting to be done, and in most organisations it never is.
The evidence here is not ambiguous
We know what happens when this goes wrong, because it has been documented carefully in one profession already.
A review commissioned by the General Medical Council, Doctors who commit suicide while under GMC fitness to practise investigation, carried out by Sarndrah Horsfall and published on 14 December 2014, found that between 2005 and 2013, twenty eight doctors died by suicide or suspected suicide while under fitness to practise investigation. Twenty four were confirmed suicides and four suspected, out of one hundred and fourteen deaths of doctors under investigation in that period. Many of them had health concerns running alongside the conduct or performance issue. More than half had been referred by their own employer.
The review did not conclude that investigations should stop. It concluded that the way they were run was part of the risk. Its recommendations were about the things an organisation actually controls: investigate promptly rather than letting cases drag, treat the person as innocent until the process says otherwise, and provide support through a route that is separate from the people conducting the investigation.
That was a regulator rather than an employer, and doctors rather than professors or engineers. The transfer is exact. Any process that combines uncertainty, loss of role, public exposure and a long timescale carries the same risk profile.
Support is not endorsement
The reason organisations withdraw is rarely cruelty. It is fear of getting it wrong. Legal advice recommends limiting contact. Communications teams are protecting the institution. Managers worry that a kind message will be read as taking sides, or produced later as evidence that the employer had already made up its mind.
This needs saying plainly. Supporting somebody is not agreeing with them. Providing a named contact, access to occupational health and a route to help says nothing whatsoever about the allegations. It says that the person is still a human being to whom you owe a duty, and that the duty does not switch off while the facts are being established.
It is also worth being honest about the other risk. An organisation that visibly abandons the person at the centre teaches everybody watching what would happen to them. That lesson does not stay in the disciplinary process. It shows up later, in what people are willing to report.
What appropriate safeguarding looks like
- Separate the process from the support. Different people, and say so clearly. The person running the investigation must not be the only voice the individual ever hears from.
- Name a contact and keep them. Regular, predictable and human. Not “we will be in touch”, which in practice means silence measured in weeks.
- Do the risk assessment on the individual, and do it early. Suspension, loss of role and identity, media exposure, financial fear and any existing health issue stack on top of one another. Ask directly whether the person is thinking of suicide. Asking does not plant the idea. It opens a door.
- Run the process quickly. Time is the hazard here, and the timescale is almost entirely within your gift. Prolonged uncertainty is the exposure.
- Extend it to everyone in the storm. The complainant and any witnesses carry their own risk, and so do the team, the line manager and whoever has to face the media. Safeguarding one person at the expense of another is not safeguarding.
Where a sector carries elevated suicide risk, or where an organisation is dealing with a case that has already reached this pitch, BS 30480, the British Standard for suicide prevention in the workplace, sets out what a proper prevention, intervention and postvention framework looks like. It exists precisely for the situations that a general wellbeing policy was never written to handle.
The duty of care exists whatever the situation. It is easy to honour when the person is popular and the facts are clear. It only means anything when they are not. So the question for any organisation watching this month’s coverage and feeling relieved it is not them is a simple one. If it were you next week, who would be picking up the phone to the person in the middle of it?
Frequently asked questions
Does supporting someone under investigation prejudice the process?
Not if it is structured properly. The risk of prejudice comes from the investigating parties expressing views, not from the organisation providing welfare support through a separate route. Occupational health, an independent point of contact and access to counselling can all sit outside the process entirely. What does prejudice a process is a long, poorly run investigation in which the person becomes too unwell to participate in their own defence.
What if the person is accused of harming others? Do we still owe them a duty of care?
Yes. The duty to the complainant comes first and is not reduced by anything you do for the person accused. Both duties are real and they are not in competition, which is why they should be handled by different people. An employer that cannot support a respondent without failing a complainant has a resourcing problem, not an ethical dilemma.
About the author
Peter J Kelly is an occupational psychologist and the founder of Being Real. He spent more than twenty years at the Health and Safety Executive shaping national policy on workplace mental health, sat on the panel that drafted ISO 45003, and was expert convenor for BS 30480. Being Real supports organisations with ISO 45003 gap analysis and certification, BS 30480 implementation, psychosocial risk assessment, strategic advisory and training.
If you or a colleague are struggling, Samaritans are free, confidential and open 24/7 on 116 123.