The Culture Beneath the Culture

I read the SafeWork NSW report on preventing stress in first responders with a deep sense of familiarity. Not surprise, exactly. More like recognition.

I was one of the former NSW Police officers who completed the survey that informed this report. I also know a number of serving and former NSWPF officers who contributed.

The survey sample was not large, and I don’t think the report should be treated as though it speaks for every first responder, but the themes it identifies are not unfamiliar to many of us who have worked inside these systems.

For me, this isn’t an abstract discussion. The issues named in the report, including organisational betrayal, moral suffering, perceived injustice, poor leadership, inadequate support and the daily conditions people are expected to keep functioning within, are not distant concepts. They’re lived experience for many people who have served, and continue to serve, inside these systems.

I don’t say that to suggest the report reflects every person’s experience, or that my own experience should be treated as universal. It shouldn’t. But when people from inside these organisations keep naming the same patterns this report now identifies, I think we should be paying close attention.

The report recognises that psychological harm is not only caused by exposure to trauma. It can also be caused by what happens around the work, after the work, and inside the organisation itself.

That raises a harder question: if these organisational conditions are harming people inside first responder agencies, what else are they shaping?

Because the conditions that harm good people inside an organisation don’t stay neatly contained there. Over time, they shape culture and decision-making. They shape what’s tolerated, what’s challenged, what’s hidden, and what’s allowed to continue.

Widening the lens beyond trauma

For a long time, first responder wellbeing has often been discussed as though the primary source of harm is the work itself, and of course, the work is often traumatic. Police, paramedics, firefighters, corrections officers and other first responders are exposed to distressing, confronting and dangerous situations as part of the job. That reality should never be minimised.

But trauma isn’t only about the event itself. It’s also about what the event does to the person who experiences it. It’s about what happens in the body, the mind, the memory, the nervous system, and the person’s sense of safety or meaning afterwards.

The same incident may affect different people in different ways, depending on their history, their role, their level of agency, the support available to them, what they were asked to carry, and whether the organisation responded with care, fairness and repair afterwards.

That’s where the report widens the lens in a useful way. It recognises that psychological harm can be caused not only by what first responders see, hear or experience at an incident, but by what happens around the work, after the work, and inside the organisation itself.

Poor leadership. Perceived injustice. Organisational betrayal. Excessive workload. Inadequate resourcing. Lack of recognition. Poor support. A sense that people are expected to keep absorbing harm without meaningful repair. These are not peripheral issues. They’re part of the working environment, and they shape how people experience the job over time.

Separating exposure from injury matters because it stops the organisation from treating harm as inevitable. First responders may be exposed to difficult work, but that does not remove the responsibility to reduce the impact of poor support, unfairness, lack of repair, or the way people are treated afterwards.

If we treat first responder distress as something caused only by exposure to trauma, the response tends to focus on the individual. We tell people to be resilient and encourage them to seek help. We point them toward support services after the damage has already been done.

Those things may still have value, but they’re not enough.

If the organisation itself is contributing to the harm, then the organisation has to be part of the prevention. Not just the response. Not just the recovery. The prevention.

When the injury is moral, not only psychological

One of the strongest parts of the report is its discussion of moral suffering.

That phrase landed heavily for me because it describes something that’s difficult to explain from the outside. It’s not just stress. It’s not just fatigue. It’s not even only trauma.

It’s the kind of harm that can happen when the work, the organisation, or the decisions being made around you begin to conflict with your sense of what’s right.

I spoke about this very issue with Narelle Fraser on her podcast recently, in a conversation about moral injury, policing, trauma and what happens when people are placed in systems that ask too much of their humanity. (LINK) It’s a conversation I’m grateful we had, because this is one of the harder parts of policing to explain clearly. The harm isn’t always attached to a single incident. Sometimes it comes from the slow accumulation of things witnessed, absorbed, excused or left unresolved.

Most people don’t join policing because they want power for its own sake. Most join because, in one way or another, they want to be useful. They want to intervene when something is wrong, bring order to chaos, help vulnerable people, hold offenders accountable, and be part of something that feels larger than themselves.

That service instinct is real. I saw and experienced it many times across my 23 years in the NSW Police Force. But I also saw what happens when people who entered the job with that sense of purpose find themselves inside systems that don’t always reflect the values they thought they were serving.

That might look like unfairness being ignored, poor behaviour being minimised, good people being left unsupported, or harm being reframed as a personality issue, a resilience issue, or simply the cost of doing the job.

Over time, that gap does something to people. It can make them angry, numb or cynical. It can make them withdraw from the very sense of purpose that brought them into the job in the first place.

For some, the harm becomes even worse when they’re later asked to prove exactly where and when the damage occurred.

When first responders are exposed to harm over years, the injury doesn’t always arrive with a neat timestamp. It may not come from one defining incident that can be easily named, documented and placed into a file. Sometimes it comes from accumulation. Years of attending traumatic events. Years of absorbing distress. Years of internal conflict, moral strain, poor support, organisational betrayal, and the quiet pressure to keep functioning long after something inside you has already started to give way.

That creates a particular cruelty when people are later asked to prove exactly what caused them to break.

Traumatic stress can affect the way events are encoded, stored and recalled. Memories may be fragmented, blurred, incomplete or difficult to place in sequence. People may carry the impact of an event without being able to neatly narrate it in the way a claims process, investigation or workplace system might prefer.

When an organisation contributes to harm over time, then penalises people for being unable to provide a clean, linear account of that harm, the process itself can become retraumatising.

It asks injured people to make their suffering administratively convenient before it will be taken seriously.

And when that happens across enough people, it doesn’t remain an individual wellbeing issue. It becomes cultural.

Prevention has to mean more than support after harm

If first responder distress is understood only as the result of exposure to difficult work, prevention can easily become too narrow. It can start to look like preparing people to cope better with the unavoidable, rather than asking whether all of the harm being carried is actually unavoidable.

Some of it is. There will always be big parts of emergency service work that are distressing, dangerous, confronting or deeply sad. No wellbeing framework can remove that reality from the job.

But some harm is preventable.

Poor leadership is preventable. Unmanageable workload can be addressed. Lack of support can be changed. Injustice can be confronted, and betrayal can be named. Systems can be designed to respond to harm with more honesty, consistency and care.

A prevention approach moves the conversation away from simply asking how injured people can recover, and toward asking what injured them in the first place. It also asks whether the organisation has the courage to look at its own role in that harm.

That’s uncomfortable work, but it’s necessary.

It means looking beyond wellbeing language and asking harder operational questions. Are people properly resourced for the work they’re expected to do? Are supervisors trained and supported to lead well, not just manage outputs? Are complaints and conflicts handled fairly? Are people protected when they raise concerns? Are patterns of harm identified early, or only after someone breaks?

Prevention is not just a mental health responsibility. It is a leadership responsibility. A governance responsibility. A cultural responsibility.

An organisation can’t outsource its duty of care to resilience training, employee assistance programs or individual coping strategies. Those supports may help people survive, but they can’t, on their own, make the system safer.

If this report is taken seriously, it can’t become another document that is acknowledged, quoted, absorbed and then quietly outlived by the same culture it was trying to address.

The point is not to create better language around harm. The point is to reduce it.

First responders deserve workplaces that are willing to look honestly at what injures people, not just offer support after the injury has occurred.

That is where any serious prevention work has to begin.

Not with a slogan. Not with a resilience module. Not with another statement about values.

With the courage to ask what is happening inside the system, and what needs to change so fewer people are harmed by it.