Stress Claims - Employers' Liability for Psychiatric Illness

An employer is under a general common law duty to take reasonable care to ensure the safety of its employees while at work. Traditionally, claims brought by employees in respect of a breach of this duty of care have been in respect of physical injuries. However, in recent years growing numbers of employees have brought claims in respect of psychiatric injury arising from occupational stress. A recent decision of the Court of Appeal, Chairman of the Governors of St. Thomas Becket RC High School -v- Hatton and Others, has set down useful guidance to help determine when an employer will be liable in respect of such stress claims and to provide practical assistance to employers in order to avoid liability. This Briefing Note sets out the principal points made by the Court of Appeal.

Elements of the common law liability

In order for an employer to be liable for psychiatric injury suffered by an employee in respect of occupational stress, the employee must prove:

(a) that the employer has breached its duty of care in relation to him;

(b) that the employee has suffered a reasonably foreseeable psychiatric injury; and

(c) that the psychiatric injury was caused by the breach of duty.

The Court of Appeal focused on the key issues of: (i) when a psychiatric injury could be said to have been reasonably foreseeable; (ii) what an employer can reasonably be expected to do to prevent such an injury; and (iii) the difficulty of ascertaining the cause of such an injury.

Foreseeability

The Court of Appeal stated that there are no occupations so intrinsically stressful that psychiatric injury is always reasonably foreseeable. Rather, foreseeability depends upon the inter-relationship between the particular demands of a job and the particular characteristics of the employee concerned. The Court listed a number of factors relevant to these issues.

With regard to demands of the job, the following factors were listed by the Court as being relevant:

the nature and extent of the work done by the employee - an employer should be more alert to picking up signs from an employee who is being over-worked in a particularly intellectually or emotionally demanding job;

whether the employee's colleagues have suffered injury to their health arising from their work or if there is an abnormal level of sickness or absenteeism in the employee's job or department.

With regard to the characteristics of the employee, the Court stated that the following might be relevant:

whether...

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