The Liability of Employers for Psychiatric Illness Suffered by Employee - Essay Example

THE COMMON LAW DUTY OF CARE, THE LIABILITY OF EMPLOYERS FOR PSYCHIATRIC ILLNESS SUFFERED BY EMPLOYEES ARISING FROM STRESSFUL CONDITIONS Date: Introduction The Employment Act demands that employers provide safe working conditions for their employees (Selwyn, 2006). Therefore, employers should provide reasonable care to employees while there are working within their premises or are undertaking any tasks for their employers. Thus, employers have legal duty of care under common law to their employees by ensuring that their workplace is free of stress causing events or factors, which can cause psychiatric illness. Discussion Munkman (1990) argue that psychiatric injuries that are caused by the negligence of an employer are actionable and amounts to liability on the side of the employer if the events and factors causing the psychiatric injuries emanate from stressful conditions within the work environment of the employer. In Walker v. Northumberland C.C. (1995), the Appeal Court ruled that an employer’s legal duty of care to the employee in the provision of risk free workplace conditions extends to a reasonably foreseeable extent to which it is determinable that an employee can suffer from psychiatric injuries because of amount or nature of work which is performed by the employee. Moreover, in Barber v Somerset CC after one of the workers, Barber appealed to the court of appeal after they seemed to have lost the case against their employer, the court restated the case and held that, employers should be proactive and take action in event of any of their employees is suffering from psychiatric illness instead of taking a “wait and see position” to help such an employee suffering from work related stress problems, which ultimately can cause psychiatric disorders (Lawteacher.net, n.d) Moreover, in the case of Sutherland v Hatton, even though the appeal court took a cautious approach in awarding damages, the court ruled that liability can only arise on the side of employer if it is determinable that the real risk of breakdown was reasonably foreseeable by the employer and that it would have been prevented. Therefore because of failure of the employer to take action, the employee suffered psychiatric illness, which resulted from the work related stress within the employer’s control. In addition, from the case of Inter Corporation (UK) Limited v Daw (2007), the court of appeal held that even though the employer provided counselling services to the employee concerning the work environment, they services failed and as result the employee suffered psychiatric injury resulting from the workplace factors and events. Therefore, the court went ahead to award the employee damages stating that the employer breached his duty of care under the common law of negligence (Butler, 2002). However, in other similar cases that were ruled by the court, it was held that for legal duty of care to arise on the side of employer, the employee ought to have informed the employer of the existence of factors, which were likely to cause psychiatric illness such as workplace stress resulting from the type and amount of work that was undertaken by the employee for the benefit of the employer. Moreover, Cohen and McKendrick (2005) argue that, for a an employer to be legally for liquidated damages for an employee who has suffered psychiatric illness resulting from the workplace stress, the events must have been reasonably foreseeable by the employer and the employer failed to take action to remedy the situation to protect the employee from suffering from psychiatric injury related disorders (Wright, 2002). Therefore, from the cases above it is evident that for a legal duty of care to exist or for the employee to receive compensation for suffering from psychiatric injury related disorders, the conditions must exist, which happen to form the backbone legal provisions for negligence. These factors include the following: The employer must owe the employee a legal duty of care (Jones and Sprince, 2000): for a liability to arise on the side of the employer the employee must prove that the employer owed him/her a duty of care and thus because of the breach of the duty of care, the employee suffered psychiatric injury related disorders. This was held in Walker v. Northumberland C.C. where Walker suffered from nervous breakdown because of stress and overworking. He reported to his employer that he was suffering from stress but the employer failed to remedy the situation resulting to Walker suffering a second breakdown (Lawteacher.net, n.d). He thus, sued NCC for breach of duty of care, which the court successful ruled that the employer breached his duty of care for the second breakdown even though the first one was unforeseeable (Hodgson and Lewthwaite, 2007). In addition, for liability arising from the breach of the legal duty of care of care to be enforceable, the employee must demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt that the situation that caused him to suffer from psychiatric illness resulted from reasonably foreseeable events, which would have been prevented by the employer (Stranks, 2006; Goldberg, and Zipursky, 2001). However, because of his/her negligence the employee suffered from workplace stress thus, causing him psychiatric injury. Moreover, for the case to be enforceable, an employee must prove beyond reasonable doubt that the employer breached his/her duty of care to protect the employee from the workplace stress hence causing him nervous breakdown (Giliker, 2010). This was held in Barber v Somerset CC in which the court restated the case and held that, employers should be proactive and take action in event of any of their employees is suffering from psychiatric illness instead of taking a “wait and see position” to help such an employee suffering from work related stress problems, which ultimately can cause psychiatric disorders. Another factor or legal provision applicable in such case include: the actions of the employer were deliberate hence causing employee psychiatric illness (Harpwood, 2009). Conclusion Therefore, from the case above and the legal provisions of the common law of negligence examined, it is evident that employers can be held responsible if they fail to remedy situations within the working place that are likely to cause stress e.g. overworking o employees thus, resulting to psychiatric illness. Ultimately, there is need thus, for employees to put in place measures to eliminate workplace stress causing causative agents. 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