Health and Safety Association Register

Abuse includes physical assault, sexual violence, emotional abuse and controlling behaviour. It is often a pattern of ongoing behaviour but may also refer to a one-off incident. Abuse can result in physical and mental health consequences for victims, perpetrators and children who are witnesses.

Harassment is a pattern of behaviour that is directed against another person, including specified acts (for example as defined in the Harassment Act 1997) that causes the other person to fear for their safety (or that would cause a reasonable person in the circumstances to fear for their safety). In common use this can also extend to fear for the person's health.

The average age of people in the New Zealand workforce is becoming older (and more female), and will stop expanding by about 2030. This will affect the labour market as ageing will affect the size, characteristics and possibly the productivity of the New Zealand workforce.

Issues that may affect workers include vision, hearing, mobility, speed, agility, memory and strength, anxiety due to retirement. Also ageing workers can have more sleep issues if doing rotating shift work. This will have implications in the way organisations will have to operate in the future in an environment where they can support their workers, and optimise productivity.

Repeated and unreasonable behaviour directed towards a person or a group of people that can lead to physical or psychological harm.

Repeated behaviour occurs more than once and can involve a range of actions over time. Unreasonable behaviour are actions that a reasonable person in the same circumstances
would see as unreasonable. It includes victimising, humiliating, intimidating or threatening a person. Bullying may also include harassment, discrimination or violence.
Common bullying behaviours fit into two main categories - attacks that are direct and personal or those that are indirect and task-related.

An illness that can affect how people feel and behave for weeks or months at a time. Depression is a state of a lasting low mood and often an aversion to activity that can affect a person's thoughts, behavior, feelings and sense of well-being, and impact sleep, relationships, job and appetite.

Some specific areas of depression include post-natal depression, depression in the elderly, physical illness (some symptoms of physical illness are difficult to distinguish from those of depression), and depression in children and adolescents.

A health and safety assessment evaluates risk generated in the workplace or in the work process with objectives to remove, reduce and replace the source of risk with safer equipment or processes, or to lessen the risk to the health and safety of the workers

This may include assessment at an organisational, business unit or site specific level.

In any organisation there will be a range of mental health experiences across employees and this will change over time. This range includes people experiencing optimal/'positive' mental health, people who are mentally unwell (and/or have a diagnosed mental illness which may or may not be being treated), people who lack general mental wellbeing (usually disengaged and unmotivated people who lack meaning or purpose in their daily lives), and people who don't meet the criteria for a diagnosable mental illness but may be highly stressed or distressed due to home or work life or a traumatic event.

Health issues can manifest in a variety of ways in the workplace. The two most significant ways in which workplaces experience poor physical and mental health of employees is through increased absenteeism (when workers are off sick), and increased presenteeism (when workers are at the workplace but not mentally engaged with work).

PTSD is a psychological reaction to experiencing or witnessing a significantly stressful, traumatic or shocking event. PTSD manifests as persistent mental and emotional stress occurring as a result of this injury or severe psychological shock, and typically involves disturbance of sleep and constant vivid recall of the experience, with dulled responses to others and to the outside world.

Without treatment PTSD can lead to depression and suicidal thoughts. Anxiety, panic attacks, eating disorders, and substance abuse are also common elements of PTSD.

Advising on remote or isolated work. Work can be remote or isolated from the assistance of other persons because of location, time, or the nature of the work. Work can be isolated without being remote, and be remote without being isolated.

Remote or isolated work includes working alone or separated from colleagues, working in a geographically isolated or inaccessible area - where the nearest emergency help (e.g. fire service or hospital) is some distance away, working outside normal business hours or shift/night work, and working in locations where communication is difficult.

Stress describes the physical or emotional response to demands or pressures that people may experience from time to time. Common causes of stress include work, money, relationships and illness. Symptoms may include irritability, difficulty sleeping or relaxing, headaches and muscle tension.

Anxiety, particularly ongoing, all-over anxiety or Generalised Anxiety Disorder (GAD), is where the level and frequency that people experience stress, distress, dismay, and worry is greatly increased. It is common for people with GAD to have other conditions such as depression, or other anxiety-related disorders like panic attacks and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Wellbeing, welfare or wellness is ageneral term for the condition of an individual or group, for example their social, economic, psychological, spiritual or medical state. A high level of wellbeing means in some sense the individual or group's condition is positive, while low wellbeing is associated with negative happenings.

Work-life balance is a concept including proper prioritizing between "work" (career and ambition) and "lifestyle" (health, pleasure, leisure, family and spiritual development/meditation).