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Public Safety Personnel, Psychological Injury and the Workplace

Dr. Megan Edgelow, Queen’s University

Tuesday, November 24, 2026
12:00 – 1:00 pm EST

For Canadian public safety personnel (PSP), including first responders, the rates and costs of work-related psychological injuries have been rising over the past decade. Public safety organizations often support the mental wellness of their employees with resilience-focused interventions, neglecting the impact of organizational factors. This webinar will explore the mental wellness and organizational experiences of PSP in Ontario using workers’ compensation, survey, and interview data.

We examined approved workers’ compensation claims for public safety personnel with psychological injuries in Ontario from 2014-2023. Claims grew from less than 300 to approximately 1,575 claims per year. Of the 11,306 claims, 93% resulted in time lost from work, the average claim length was 747 days, and only 36% had a successful return to work outcome documented. We also studied the workplace experiences of Ontario PSP, with participants identifying low staffing, low managerial support, and conflict at work as chronic stressors. Available supports included peer support programs, critical incident debriefing, and extended health benefits, with mixed feedback on effectiveness.

Our research suggests that PSP would benefit from proactive mental wellness supports that consider personal choice to reduce the cumulative impact of work-related trauma exposures, as well as prompt access to recovery and return to work (RTW) supports, to improve RTW outcomes and decrease workers’ compensation claim duration. Additionally, more attention to organization-level interventions to address chronic work-related stressors is needed. A discussion of these findings will consider the most impactful use of organizational resources to support PSP mental wellness.

Learning objectives

Participants will learn to:

Describe the financial costs of WSIB Ontario mental stress injury claims for PSP between 2014 and 2023, including earnings and benefit replacement costs and healthcare usage;
Consider employee usage of and experiences with organizational mental wellness supports; and
Discuss the most impactful and cost-effective ways to address PSP mental wellness at work.

Presenter

Dr. Megan Edgelow
Occupational Therapist and Associate Professor
Queen’s University

Dr. Megan Edgelow is an occupational therapist, researcher, and educator who specializes in workplace mental health and occupational therapy interventions. She teaches and supervises graduate students within the School of Rehabilitation Therapy at Queen’s University. As the lead researcher of the Work and Mental Health Lab, her academic work focuses heavily on participation and time use, workplace wellness, and the organizational mental health of public safety personnel. In addition to her university roles, she is a co-author of the occupational therapy workbook Action Over Inertia and operates a private, community-based occupational therapy practice focused on Veteran mental health. 