Psychosocial Risk and the Duty of Care: What Regulators Now Expect
On 1 July 2026, New South Wales changed the question an inspector asks about psychosocial risk. Approved codes of practice stopped being helpful guidance and became the benchmark. A business now either follows the psychosocial code or proves it manages the risk to an equal or higher standard. "Show me your system" replaced "did anyone get hurt?"
New South Wales is one example of a wider shift. Across the jurisdictions where maritime, mining and energy operators work, the duty to protect health already covered psychological harm. What has changed is how explicitly regulators now spell out what that duty requires, and how much evidence they expect to see.
This article maps four regimes: Australia, Great Britain, Singapore, and the Maritime Labour Convention, 2006. It sets out what each one actually requires, what legal weight each instrument carries, and the practical floor they share. It is general guidance, not legal advice. Confirm your specific duties with counsel and your regulator.
What "duty of care" means for psychosocial risk
In occupational health and safety law, duty of care means a duty holder must protect workers' health and safety so far as is reasonably practicable. In most modern regimes, "health" means physical and psychological health. That has been true for years. The recent change is regulation that names psychosocial hazards directly and tells duty holders how to control them.
A psychosocial hazard is anything in the design, management or social context of work that can cause psychological or physical harm. Safe Work Australia's list is a useful reference: job demands, low job control, poor support, lack of role clarity, poor organisational change management, inadequate reward and recognition, poor organisational justice, traumatic events, remote or isolated work, poor physical environment, violence and aggression, bullying, harassment, and conflict.
The duty itself does not ask you to make people happy. It asks you to find the hazards in how work is organised, assess the risk, control it, consult workers, and check that the controls work.
Australia: a model framework with state differences
Australia is the most prescriptive of the four, and the easiest to get wrong, because there is no single national rule.
The model framework. Safe Work Australia publishes the model WHS laws that most jurisdictions have adopted. Under them, a person conducting a business or undertaking (PCBU) must manage psychosocial risks with the same risk management process used for physical hazards. The model WHS Regulations include specific psychosocial provisions, regulations 55A to 55D, and one of the matters a PCBU must consider is the design, layout and environmental conditions of the workplace. Safe Work Australia also publishes the Model Code of Practice: Managing psychosocial hazards at work. A model code has legal effect only where a jurisdiction has approved it.
New South Wales. SafeWork NSW issued its Code of Practice: Managing psychosocial hazards at work in May 2021. The Work Health and Safety Regulation 2025 then strengthened the rules, including mandatory use of the hierarchy of control measures for psychosocial risk. From 1 July 2026, section 26A of the NSW WHS Act requires a PCBU to comply with an approved code or manage the risk to an equivalent or higher standard. For psychosocial risk, that turned the code into the measuring stick.
Victoria. Victoria sits outside the model WHS laws and runs its own Occupational Health and Safety Act 2004. The Occupational Health and Safety (Psychological Health) Regulations 2025 commenced on 1 December 2025. They require employers to identify psychosocial hazards and eliminate the risk so far as is reasonably practicable. Where elimination is not practicable, employers must reduce the risk by altering the management of work, plant, systems of work, work design or the workplace environment. Information, instruction and training can only stand alone when those alterations are not reasonably practicable, and cannot be the predominant control in a combination. A companion Compliance Code, "Psychological health", took effect on the same date.
Queensland has had its own psychosocial regulation and code of practice in force since April 2023. Western Australia runs its own WHS Act and code. Operators with sites in more than one state should work from each state's instruments, not the model text alone.
The common expectation across Australia: identify psychosocial hazards, assess the risk, apply the hierarchy of controls with work design changes first, consult workers and health and safety representatives, and review.
Great Britain: a legal duty and a recognised method
In Great Britain, the duty comes from the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 and the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999, which require a suitable and sufficient risk assessment. Work-related stress sits inside that duty.
The Health and Safety Executive states it plainly on its Management Standards page: employers have a legal duty to protect employees from stress at work by doing a risk assessment and acting on it.
The HSE Management Standards are the recognised way to do that. They cover six areas of work design:
Demands: workload, work patterns and the work environment
Control: how much say people have in the way they work
Support: encouragement and resources from the organisation, line managers and colleagues
Relationships: positive working and how unacceptable behaviour is handled
Role: whether people understand their role and avoid conflicting roles
Change: how organisational change is managed and communicated
HSE says that following the Management Standards approach correctly counts as suitable and sufficient. Organisations can use another approach, but HSE expects it to be suitably equivalent. The Management Standards are not a separate Act of Parliament. They are HSE's accepted method for meeting a duty that already exists in law.
Singapore: guidance inside the WSH system
Singapore's design is different, and multinational operators need to say so clearly.
The Workplace Safety and Health Act places a general duty on employers to take reasonably practicable measures to ensure the safety and health of employees. Singapore has no psychosocial-specific regulations equivalent to Victoria's or New South Wales's. The primary national document is the Tripartite Advisory on Mental Well-being at Workplaces, issued jointly by the Ministry of Manpower, the Singapore National Employers Federation and the National Trades Union Congress. The current version was issued on 20 November 2023.
The Advisory recommends that organisations review employees' mental well-being regularly as part of risk assessment for workplace health. It points to surveys and focus groups, names iWorkHealth, the free assessment tool developed by MOM's WSH Institute and partners, and asks employers to address work stressors and track whether their measures work. The WSH Council's Playbook on Workplace Mental Well-being gives step-by-step support.
This is practical guidance. It is not Australian-style hard law on psychosocial hazards. Singapore's Workplace Fairness Act, passed in January 2025, will add mental health condition as a protected characteristic in employment decisions once it commences, which is expected by the end of 2027. That is anti-discrimination law. It sits beside psychosocial risk management and does not replace it.
Maritime: MLC, 2006 Regulation 4.3
For shipowners, the relevant international instrument is the Maritime Labour Convention, 2006. Regulation 4.3, on health and safety protection and accident prevention, exists to ensure that seafarers' work environment on board ships promotes occupational safety and health. Standard A4.3 requires flag states to adopt laws covering shipboard safety and health policies and programmes, including risk evaluation.
The ILO's Guidelines for implementing the occupational safety and health provisions of the MLC, 2006, adopted by a tripartite meeting of experts in 2014, go further. They describe a maritime working environment with psychological and social elements, and name isolation, long hours, rigid organisational structures, stress and fatigue as features of seafaring work.
The guidelines are a practical resource for flag states. The flag state's own laws and implementing measures are the authoritative statement of what a shipowner must do. In practice, that means psychosocial conditions belong in shipboard OSH risk management under the flag state's rules, not in a shore-side HR file. Commercial vetting schemes that ask about crew welfare add a diligence layer on top. They are not the law.
The four regimes side by side
Jurisdiction | Main Instrument | Legal Character | What Duty Holders Must Evidence | Primary Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Australia (model WHS) | Model WHS Regulations 55A–55D; Model Code of Practice | Regulations are law where adopted; model code has force only where approved | Hazard identification, risk assessment, controls using the hierarchy, consultation, review | |
New South Wales | WHS Regulation 2025; Code of Practice (2021); WHS Act s26A | Regulation is law; since 1 July 2026, the code is the compliance benchmark | Compliance with the code, or evidence of an equivalent or higher standard | |
Victoria | OHS (Psychological Health) Regulations 2025; Compliance Code | Regulations are law from 1 December 2025; breach of the Compliance Code is not itself a breach of the Act | Hazard identification, elimination or work-design controls first, training only where alterations are not practicable, review | |
Great Britain | HSWA 1974; Management Regulations 1999; HSE Management Standards | Duty is law; Management Standards are HSE's recognised method | A suitable and sufficient stress risk assessment, acted on | |
Singapore | WSH Act general duty; Tripartite Advisory (2023) | General duty is law; Advisory is practical guidance | Regular review of mental well-being within workplace health risk assessment; measures tracked for effect | |
Maritime | MLC, 2006 Reg 4.3 and Standard A4.3; ILO OSH guidelines | Convention implemented through flag-state law; guidelines are supplementary | Shipboard OSH policies and programmes, including risk evaluation, under flag-state requirements |
Where ISO 45003 fits
ISO 45003 is international guidance on managing psychosocial risk inside an occupational health and safety management system. It is not law anywhere, and organisations cannot certify to it on its own. Certification sits with ISO 45001.
ISO 45003 is still useful across all four regimes because it gives a multi-country operator one method language. The same hazard categories, risk register structure and control logic can serve an Australian code, an HSE risk assessment, a Singapore workplace health review and a flag-state OSH programme. Local law sets the obligation. ISO 45003 helps you organise the work to meet it. If you want to see where your current system falls short against the standard, an ISO 45003 gap analysis is the usual starting point.
The shared floor
Strip the jurisdictional detail away and the four regimes ask for the same five things.
Identify. Find the psychosocial hazards in how work is designed and run. Use consultation, observation, data you already hold, and structured tools.
Assess. Work out who is exposed, how often, for how long and how severely. Consider how hazards combine. Long rotations plus isolation plus a supervisor who is never reachable is a different risk from any one of those alone.
Control at source. Change the work first. Adjust workload, manning, rosters, role clarity, supervision and how the organisation responds when people raise concerns. Training and information support those controls. On their own, they rarely satisfy a regulator.
Consult. Involve workers and their representatives in identifying hazards and choosing controls. Every regime listed here expects it.
Review. Check whether controls work, and revisit them after incidents, complaints, organisational change or new data.
What is not enough
A wellbeing policy, an employee assistance programme and a resilience workshop are the most common psychosocial "system" in heavy industry. None of them controls a hazard in the work itself.
Victoria's regulations say it most directly: information, instruction and training can only be relied on alone when changes to the work are not reasonably practicable. New South Wales now mandates the hierarchy of controls. HSE's Management Standards all describe conditions of work design. An EAP helps a person who is already struggling. It does not change the roster that caused the fatigue or the manning level that left someone working alone.
How to evidence it without drowning in paperwork
Regulators want to see a working system, not a filing cabinet. Four things carry most of the weight.
A psychosocial risk register that names specific hazards, exposed roles, existing controls, residual risk, owners and review dates. Our guide to putting psychosocial hazards on your risk register covers the structure.
Measurement that shows where the risk actually sits. A structured diagnostic across the workforce gives you data by site, role and rotation instead of a single engagement score. Wellbeing Daily's Psychosocial Risk Assessment reviews your system clause by clause against ISO 45003 and produces a risk register and hazard-to-control matrix. The Six Drivers diagnostic, adapted for industry from Jan-Emmanuel De Neve and George Ward's Oxford research, measures the system conditions workers experience.
Consultation records that show workers helped identify hazards and choose controls.
Review evidence that shows controls were tested and changed when they did not work.
Frequently asked questions
Do employers have a duty of care for psychosocial risk?
Yes, in substance, across the major regimes. Employers, or PCBUs in Australia, must protect workers' health, and health includes psychological health. They meet that duty through risk management: identifying psychosocial hazards, assessing the risk, controlling it so far as is reasonably practicable or through a suitable and sufficient assessment, consulting workers, and reviewing controls. The legal instrument differs by country and, in Australia, by state. This is general guidance, not legal advice. Confirm your duties with counsel and your regulator.
What does Safe Work Australia expect for psychosocial hazards?
Safe Work Australia publishes the model WHS framework used across most of Australia, including psychosocial provisions in the model WHS Regulations and a Model Code of Practice on managing psychosocial hazards at work. Under that framework, a PCBU must manage psychosocial risks with the same process used for other WHS risks: identify hazards, assess risks, apply the hierarchy of control measures, consult, and review. The model code only has legal effect where a jurisdiction has approved it. Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland and Western Australia each have their own instruments, so operators should work from their state regulator's rules.
Are the UK HSE Management Standards a legal requirement?
The duty is a legal requirement. The Management Standards are the recognised method for meeting it. Employers in Great Britain have a legal duty to protect employees from stress at work by doing a risk assessment and acting on it. HSE's Management Standards cover six areas: Demands, Control, Support, Relationships, Role and Change. HSE treats the Management Standards approach, followed correctly, as suitable and sufficient. Employers can use another approach if it is suitably equivalent.
How does Singapore's approach differ from Australia's?
Singapore relies on the general duty in the Workplace Safety and Health Act plus practical guidance, mainly the Tripartite Advisory on Mental Well-being at Workplaces issued by MOM, SNEF and NTUC. The Advisory recommends reviewing mental well-being as part of workplace health risk assessment, using tools such as iWorkHealth, and tracking whether measures work. Australia has express psychosocial regulations and codes of practice with legal force. Multinational operators should not assume an Australian compliance pack matches Singapore's expectations, or the reverse.
What does MLC, 2006 require for seafarer occupational safety and health?
Regulation 4.3 of the Maritime Labour Convention, 2006 requires that seafarers' work environment on board ships promotes occupational safety and health. Flag states implement it through national law, including shipboard safety and health policies and programmes with risk evaluation. The ILO's 2014 guidelines on maritime occupational safety and health recognise isolation, long hours, rigid organisational structures, stress and fatigue as features of seafaring work. Shipowners should treat psychosocial conditions as part of shipboard OSH risk management under their flag state's rules.
Is an EAP or resilience training enough to meet psychosocial duties?
No. Employee assistance programmes and resilience training support individuals, but they do not control hazards in how work is designed, organised and led. Regulators that apply the hierarchy of controls expect changes to the work first, such as workload, staffing, supervision, isolation and how the organisation responds to concerns, before relying on information and training. A defensible system shows a risk assessment, controls matched to the hazards, consultation and review, with support services as one layer.
This article is general information, not legal advice. Regulatory requirements change and vary by jurisdiction. Confirm your obligations with legal counsel and your regulator.
Need to know where your psychosocial risk actually sits? Wellbeing Daily's diagnostics give you the evidence a regulator expects to see and a prioritised plan to act on it. Talk to us.