Mental health programs alone won’t fix psychological injury among public safety workers

Paramedics wheel a patient into the emergency department at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto in 2021. The public safety sector includes correctional workers, communicators and dispatchers, firefighters, paramedics and police. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Cole Burston Mental health programs alone won’t fix psychological injury among public safety workers Published: July 20, 2026 12.22pm EDT Share article Print article 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 These hazards include poor leadership support, excessive workloads, bullying and harassment, outdated infrastructure and inadequate resources to do the work.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. A correctional officer walks inside the Collins Bay Institution in Kingston, Ont., in 2016. A recent Ontario Coroner’s Review documented 34 deaths by suicide among correctional workers over the past 15 years. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Lars Hagberg 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…