Comcare is now naming "trauma at work" as its own psychosocial hazard

Comcare announced a new workshop this month, "Understanding and addressing trauma at work," aimed at workers and managers who need to recognise trauma exposure as a psychosocial hazard in its own right, and to assess, control, and monitor the risk it creates. It's available for in-house delivery, and it's Comcare's first public content to name trauma specifically, rather than folding it into broader mental health or bullying categories, since the federal regulator's psychosocial guidance went quiet for three weeks in July. The distinction is not just semantic. Trauma exposure, whether from a single critical incident or cumulative exposure to distressing material, behaves differently to a workload or role-clarity hazard. It can require different controls: debriefing protocols, exposure limits for roles that handle distressing content repeatedly, and manager training that is specific to recognising trauma responses rather than generic "check in with your team" guidance. A risk register that lists "mental health" as one line item, with one generic control, will not hold up against a hazard-specific finding the way a register that separately names trauma exposure and its own controls will. For PCBUs in sectors where trauma exposure is a known feature of the job, emergency services, healthcare, insurance claims handling, customer-facing roles dealing with distressing complaints, this is the signal to check whether trauma sits in the risk register as its own named hazard, or whether it is currently invisible inside a broader category. The gap is easy to find in an audit and easy to close before one. Comcare's workshop won't be the last federal signal to split trauma out as its own hazard category. Regulators tend to converge on the same taxonomy once one names it publicly. The organisations that already have trauma-specific controls documented won't need to scramble when that convergence happens.