Law

Women comprise the majority of Australia's healthcare workforce yet remain underrepresented in leadership. This structural inequity has direct consequences for workforce sustainability and patient outcomes. Australia's new gender equality target-setting requirements, which create binding obligations for large employers, including major healthcare services, offer a timely mechanism to address this structural inequity. In this article, we explain why gender equality targets matter for healthcare, outline who must comply and what is required and describe how health services and training settings can embed targets within governance, clinical accountability and workforce systems. We introduce the Monash Learning Health System Maturity Matrix as a practical tool for aligning targets with organisational maturity and argue that, when implemented well, gender equality targets go beyond compliance, building the institutional resilience and culture that retains talent and delivers better care.

Belinda Garth, Nicole Pope, Jenny Proimos, Helena J. Teede

The psychosocial hazards of healthcare are well-recognized and are now subject to new legislation in Australia. Missing from this discussion has been the recognition of the second victim phenomenon—the distress experienced by healthcare workers involved in an adverse event, medical error or unexpected patient outcome—which appears to meet criteria for a psychosocial hazard. Organizations should ensure support for second victims by building a restorative and just culture, including ensuring all staff are educated on the second victim phenomenon and can support their colleagues, implementing a staff peer-support programme and ensuring that specialist mental health supports, such as an employee assistance programme, are geared towards supporting the second victim.

Sarah Michael