By Ella Garling, OHS Alert
Educating staff on when and why to report safety incidents, and establishing a specialised committee against workplace violence, are some of the ways an NDIS provider is managing the ongoing risks associated with occupational violence and aggression.
ermha365, a complex mental health and disability support service, recently won the award for “WHS team of the Year” at the Australian Workplace Health and Safety Awards, for its occupational violence and aggression taskforce.
The taskforce was aimed at reducing occupational violence and aggression in supported living settings for National Disability Insurance Scheme clients, noting the complex risks workers in these environments can face.
Speaking to OHS Alert about the initiative, Clare Hutton said that when she started as ermha365’s WHS manager three years ago, the first thing she sought to improve was incident reporting.
She noted ermha365 already had a risk management system, but she needed to focus heavily on getting staff to report incidents from a WHS perspective.
Staff were “reporting about things that were happening to the clients”, and the things that happened to staff members, like being shouted at or having objects thrown at them, were buried in those documents, Hutton said.
The latter information was “just sitting in the client incidents”, and the business didn’t have a clear picture of what was actually happening to its workers, she said.
Hutton’s first step was to clone the client reports, and adjust the duplicates to reflect a staff-incident perspective “so we could separate the two and see what was happening to the staff”.
“From then we could really see that there was a big issue. [This] was already known, but [we] had no data to back it up.”
ermha365 subsequently used the data to create a multi-disciplinary committee, which included individuals from clinical governance, quality, safeguarding and risk, as well as a clinical advisor and operations manager.
This meant the committee had a mix of people that understood different parts of the business, Hutton said.
“We created an online survey, which had about 30 questions, and we really pushed that,” she added. The survey asks workers about the parts of the business they work in, the kinds of clients they deal with, and the different experiences they have.
For verbal aggression, they are asked if they are shouted or sworn at, and who is shouting or swearing – a client, the parents of a client, or another staff member.
For physical aggression, most workers “knew what that was and they were more than likely to report it”, but verbal aggression mostly went unreported, Hutton said.
Staff “didn’t really think it was necessary”, she said, adding she worked on changing perceptions in this area, instructing staff that “it’s not part of your job and it’s not acceptable”.
ermha365 used the survey responses as a tool, taking staff comments from the survey and putting them into a series of four posters.
Hutton said the posters sought to educate staff that while it might not be possible to eliminate occupational violence and aggression in the industry, it is still unacceptable and needs to be reported and actioned.
Notably, ermha365 saw a 146 per cent increase – from 389 to 958 – in occupational violence and aggression incident reports, in just one year, she said.
Reflecting on the changes and impacts of the taskforce, Hutton said the health and safety section of ermha365’s staff survey, asking staff questions such as if they felt they had “a safe place to work”, has seen the highest score of all performance categories for two years running.
“There is a lot of work to do and it is something that we’re continually trying to improve. And as I said it will never be perfect, it just won’t,” she said.
“But the fact that staff know that they can report [incidents] and that they won’t get in trouble for reporting… shows their knowledge has really improved.”
This article was originally published by OHS Alert on 2 December, 2025 and republished by ermha365 with permission.
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