A recent Ontario Coroner’s Review documented 34 deaths by suicide among correctional workers over the past 15 years, with 17 of those deaths occurring since 2020.
Correctional workers are one group within Ontario’s public safety sector, which also includes communicators and dispatchers, firefighters, paramedics and police.
Growing evidence shows that the psycho-social hazards of public safety work are not being prevented and managed. These hazards include poor leadership support, excessive workloads, bullying and harassment, outdated infrastructure and inadequate resources to do the work.
The result is a workforce absorbing harm that better workplace design could reduce or prevent.
The scope of the problem
This pattern shows up clearly in a decade of Ontario workers’ compensation data.
In a study published in December 2025, my colleagues and I explored 10 years of approved workers’ compensation claims from public safety personnel to the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB) of Ontario. We focused on psychological injury claims, including post-traumatic stress disorder.
More than 11,000 people were in the data set, including public safety communicators/dispatchers, correctional workers, firefighters, paramedics and police from across the province. Psychological injury claims increased 400 per cent between 2014 and 2018 and have remained at that elevated rate since. Only one-third of these workers had successfully returned to work by the conclusion of the study.
Further research on this data set, forthcoming from us later this year, has documented more than $1.3 billion in costs for WSIB Ontario and employers. This includes wage replacement and health-care benefits for these psychologically injured workers.
That figure is a dramatic underestimation of the true cost to federal, provincial and municipal employers. It does not account for employer-funded sick leave, long-term disability, extended health benefits, mental health programs or the cost of replacing psychologically injured workers.
Reactions to workplace mental health supports
In the past decade, many public safety employers have moved to mitigate the impact of psychological injury. But rather than focusing on the health and safety of the workplace itself, they have put mental health support programs into place.
My recent research with colleagues shows that Ontario public safety personnel have mixed reactions to the mental health supports offered by their employers.
More than 600 study participants shared concerns about the trustworthiness and confidentiality of internal peer support and mental health programs. They also expressed frustration with the low utility of reactive supports like employee assistance programs (EAPs). Many felt that educational resources and training efforts were “tick box” exercises.
Additionally, many initiatives failed to respond to the actual stressors of the job. These included poor employer communication and change-management practices, chronic understaffing, toxic organizational culture, aging infrastructure and inadequate resources.
My previous research has shown the difficulties faced by Ontario public safety personnel with psychological injuries in planning for a return to work and receiving needed workplace accommodations.
Respondents from our current study showed a preference for privacy, variety and choice in their mental health supports. That included access to extended health benefits where they could choose both mental and physical health-care professionals, and could engage with these services in their communities rather than their workplaces.
Numerous participants addressed the need for increased or even unlimited access to mental health professionals through extended health benefits. A potential barrier identified by study participants was that part-time workers, including many paramedics, seasonal or volunteer firefighters and provincial correctional workers, may lack access to these employer-funded benefits.
Organizational change is more effective
Large-scale evidence has identified the ineffectiveness of individually focused workplace mental well-being programs. One evidence synthesis from 2023 looked at organizational-level interventions to improve the psycho-social work environment. It synthesized 52 reviews from a wide variety of workplaces.
The review concluded that changing the work itself was more effective than focusing specifically on worker well-being. That includes changes to the timing of work, workers’ influence over their own tasks, mentoring and leadership development, and workplace violence prevention. Improving the psycho-social work environment also had a greater chance of improving worker well-being as a knock-on effect.
A recent Institute for Work and Health report similarly found that employers should move away from a singular focus on individual solutions like resilience training. Instead, it recommends a greater emphasis on organizational factors such as leadership, job design and workplace culture.
Recent evidence also shows that managers have a major influence on the mental health of their employees. That further underscores the importance of mentoring and leadership training.
What employers can do differently
One way to understand these overlapping factors is through the TRi-Operational-Organizational-Personal factor model (TROOP), which points to the impacts of public safety work itself, the environments where that work takes place and the personnel who carry it out.
Employers have so far focused mainly on the personal aspects of mental health. An orientation toward organizational factors is likely a more effective and evidence-informed approach.
Employers can intervene at the organizational level in many ways, for example:
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They can design work with more flexibility, ensure adequate staffing, encourage a culture of rest and breaks and address aging infrastructure and inadequate work resources.
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They can work to improve organizational culture through clear and enforced harassment and workplace violence policies, anti-stigma initiatives and mentoring and team-building activities.
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They can ensure that all employees are eligible for robust extended health benefits, supporting employee choice in confidential, community-based mental health supports.
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Finally, they can institute leader and manager training to ensure leadership best practices, psychological safety in the workplace and a stronger understanding of disability management and return-to-work approaches.
It’s important to balance approaches to more seriously consider prevention efforts and organizational interventions if we want to decrease the rates of psychological injury, as well as help those already injured to recover.
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