A think tank is investigating whether mental health is the forgotten issue in industry health and safety programmes.

Four organisations – The Samaritans, CIBSE Patrons, Electrical Contractors’’ Association (ECA) and The Building Engineering Services Association (BESA) – have teamed up to campaign for mental health issues and workplace stress to be addressed in the building engineering services sector.

The campaign comes after a joint survey from ECA and BESA found that 31% of building engineering service companies admitted that they found on-site mental health issues difficult to manage.

Meanwhile, four in five of the firms surveyed also said that they believe mental health issues in the workplace will have a growing impact on them over the next vie to ten year period.

Paul McLaughlin, BESA Chief Executive, said that mental health remains the forgotten health and safety issue.

“As an industry, we have made impressive progress on workplace safety in the past 20 years, but on health – and mental health in particular – we still have a long way to go,” he said.

The think tank says that the survey was a good initiative that was aimed at a key demographic, but we still have to consider the bigger picture and find out the extent to which mental health issues are affecting individual members of teams. Their goal is now to find out whether mental health is a big issue for organisations.

These themes will form the basis of discussion at this month’s think tank discussion, with the following questions to be specifically addressed: Are workplace stress and other mental health concerns a “forgotten health and safety” issue? Are links between stress and mental health being made? What initiatives have you been involved with? Is a strong HR department key to good mental health awareness? And what do you see as the true extent of the problem?

The group is now encouraging industry workers to respond to the questions.