Young people and new recruits should be given all the facts about post-traumatic stress before applying for certain high-risk jobs, and even possibly screened in advance to determine their “resilience” to the illness, a new report from a provincial roundtable suggests.

The report, entitled Roundtable on Traumatic Mental Stress, heard input from 20 individuals employed in jobs in Ontario where mental health trauma such as post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) may be a risk factor, including health-care services, fire services, police and public transit.

The roundtable met six times from November 2012 to September of last year, and its 33-page report, released Tuesday, contains a wide range of suggestions and ideas for preventing, and also helping workers cope with, job-related trauma.

Among their suggestions is having the Ministry of Health and Long Term Care establish a crisis centre/response team that would be deployed when a traumatic event has happened.

Other suggestions include making it mandatory for employers to provide training on responding to traumatic events, and using “peer-oriented” approaches such as allowing workers who have experienced trauma to educate workers about mental stress injuries.

Creating an easy-to-remember hotline number would be another way to improve access to resources and information, roundtable members said. There may also be a role for Ontario’s Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB) to help workers who’ve experienced trauma navigate supports and services, the roundtable says.

Certain jobs should be marketed “realistically,” ensuring recruits and young people are aware of the risks of traumatic incidents, and applicants for these jobs could perhaps be “screened for resilience” to determine how they might cope with exposure to trauma, the report says.

One of the roundtable members, Louis Rodrigues, a vice-president with the Ontario Council of Hospital Unions, said employers need to look for the warning signs of trauma, and “not just turn away and wait for a catastrophe.”

“There needs to be training in the workplace to understand what is happening (when there’s trauma),” Rodrigues added.

The roundtable report notes its findings don’t reflect a consensus among the group.

The roundtable, struck by Ontario’s Ministry of Labour, was intended as an exchange of “best practices” across several sectors.

Experts included Dr. Ash Bender, a staff psychiatrist and clinical leader at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, and Dr. Rakesh Jetly, a senior psychiatrist and advisor with the Canadian Armed Forces.

To help implement the ideas and continue the roundtable’s work, the province is planning to host a conference next year on work-related traumatic mental stress.