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Years after the federal government began adopting policies aimed improving mental health in the public service, there is a new focus on trying to measure it.

Wesley Yung, a statistician with Statistics Canada, admitted Wednesday that coming up with a way to measure mental health in the massive and widely varied public sector workforce is not easy.

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“How do you measure something that is really, really hard to measure?”

But Yung, who is part of an interdepartmental committee tasked with doing just that, said developing mental health workplace indicators is essential.

“If you can’t measure it, how are you going to improve it?”

The federal government has been involved in numerous initiatives in recent years focused on mental well-being in the workplace. That partly reflects a changing attitude toward mental illness in society and a growing push to end stigma.

Yung and others told a government Innovation conference at the National Arts Centre Wednesday that the goal is to not just to measure the well-being of public servants, but to analyze what is working and develop tools to help improve mental health among public sector workers.