A 75 per cent reduction in two years, and what would make that number hold up

Ahead of the Psychosocial Safety Summit at Twin Towns on 9 September, the Psychosocial Safety and Leadership Institute has been promoting its Awards Winner Panel. One panellist is Kayla Parker of the Port of Newcastle, credited with embedding psychosocial safety into Executive Leadership, Safety and People and Culture as one coordinated strategy, and cutting identified psychosocial risk areas by 75 per cent in two years. PSLI has now published that figure twice, and it has become the reference operator metric for psychosocial risk reduction in the Australian market. Treat it as a positive example, because it is one. The detail that the strategy was owned across three functions is not decoration. It means one risk register was shared by Executive Leadership, Safety and People and Culture rather than three overlapping views of the problem, and a single owned register is part of what makes a reduction figure credible in the first place. The point worth drawing out is that a headline like "75 per cent in two years" is a statement about a measurement, not a fact you can accept at face value. The same words can describe genuine control improvement or simply a change in how risk areas were counted between the start point and the end point. What separates the two is the evidence. If you were asked to stand behind your own psychosocial numbers, you would need a dated baseline of identified risk areas, the specific controls placed against each one, a named owner for every control, review dates that were set and actually met, and monitoring data across the full period showing the reduction is real and has held. Without that, a percentage is an assertion. With it, the percentage is a summary of a record someone can inspect. That record is also what a regulator or a workers compensation claim will ask for, and it has to be contemporaneous. A baseline reconstructed after the fact, or review dates recorded as intentions rather than events, does not carry the same weight. The Port of Newcastle result is worth aspiring to. The discipline that would let you state your own version of it, and defend it, is the dated trail of named hazards, named owners, met review dates and sustained monitoring behind the number.