$1.75 billion in five years: what the NSW Auditor-General told the police force about its own wellbeing program

The numbers are already showing it. Psychological injury has become the dominant workers' compensation cost, while medical discharges continue to rise. Organisations have EAPs, post-incident support and wellbeing programs, yet the trend remains unchanged. The reason is simple: support that begins after injury cannot prevent the injury occurring in the first place.

This is no longer merely an internal observation. An independent statutory auditor has now placed the same finding on the public record, examining one of the country's largest employers and reaching a conclusion many organisations are beginning to recognise in their own data.

What did the Auditor-General actually find?

In 2025 the NSW Auditor-General published The Mental Health and Wellbeing of NSW Police. The headline figure is the kind that ends up in a board paper: psychological injury claims accounted for 74% of the NSW Police Force's total workers compensation costs over the five years to June 2024 — approximately $1.75 billion (NSW Auditor-General, 2025).

The finding underneath the number is harder to read and harder to ignore. The Auditor-General concluded that "the NSW Police Force is not efficiently or effectively preventing future psychological injuries to the police workforce" (NSW Auditor-General, 2025). Not under-resourced. Not behind on rollout. Not preventing — full stop.

This was not a force that ignored the problem. It is a force that spent against it. The audit recorded $34 million on proactive wellbeing services across 2020–2025, set against $60 million in administrative costs for the Health, Safety and Wellbeing Command over a comparable window (NSW Auditor-General, 2025). More money went to running the apparatus than to the prevention work the apparatus was meant to deliver. That is not a budget problem. It is an operating-model problem.

Why does spending more on support not bend the curve?

The Auditor-General was precise about where the spend was going wrong. Existing initiatives, the report found, "provide counselling and support … do not address other psychological risk factors such as fatigue, role overload, or burnout" (NSW Auditor-General, 2025).

Read that twice, because it is the whole argument. The investment was concentrated downstream — at the point where someone is already injured and reaches for help. Nothing in the model was watching the upstream drivers that produce the injury in the first place. Fatigue, role overload and burnout are not feelings to be counselled away after the fact. They are psychosocial hazards, and under work health and safety law they sit in exactly the same category as a guard missing from a machine. They are meant to be identified, assessed and controlled before harm occurs.

An EAP is reactive support. It is necessary, and it is downstream by design — it activates after the harm has landed. What the audit describes is an organisation that built a strong bottom-of-the-cliff response and almost nothing at the top. The discharge data is the cliff doing its work: medical discharges for psychological injury rose from 220 in 2019 to 611 in 2023, with 103 recorded in the first quarter of 2024 alone (NSW Parliament, 2024). Those are not claims. Those are people who do not come back.

How does this apply beyond policing?

Because the finding is not about policing. It is about a structural gap that any employer with an EAP and a rising psychological injury bill will recognise in its own ledger.

The mechanism is identical across sectors. Organisations invest heavily in support after harm occurs: EAPs, post-incident processes and wellbeing champions. What often goes unmeasured are the conditions generating the harm: excessive workload, poor recovery between shifts, or management structures stretched beyond effective supervision. These risks accumulate quietly, yet are frequently absent from the registers used to govern people risk.

It applies with particular force to state-owned entities, agencies and self-insurers, who carry the claims cost directly and answer to the same WHS duty. But the structure is general. A tier-2 construction principal, a multi-site aged care provider, a logistics operator running shifts across depots — each can spend heavily on support and still watch the curve climb, for the same reason the police did: nobody is measuring the hazard upstream of the EAP.

What does prevention actually look like as infrastructure?

The honest answer is that prevention is not a service that can be bought and switched on. It is people-risk infrastructure installed into the operating model — and it is the operations function, not HR, that owns the result, because the levers that drive the hazard (rostering, workload allocation, span of control, role design) are operational levers.

Structured prevention starts where the Auditor-General said the police had a blind spot: a psychosocial safety framework that names the hazards, a risk assessment that measures them against the actual work, and a risk register that puts fatigue, role overload and burnout in front of decision-makers as line items — not as sentiment, but as controllable risk. From there, the hierarchy of controls applies as it would to any other hazard: address the cause of the harm first, then rely on support measures such as an EAP only where residual risk remains.

Done properly, this cuts both ways on the EAP. It reduces the need for it, because fewer people are pushed to the point of escalation. And it increases appropriate uptake, because people are connected with support earlier, before the injury is severe enough to become a claim or a discharge. That is also where officer due diligence lives. "Reasonably practicable" is not satisfied by having bought counselling. After this audit, an officer asked what they did to control a known psychosocial hazard cannot point to a downstream response and call it prevention.

Is this a mental health problem or a risk problem?

It is a risk problem, and the framing matters because it determines who owns it and how it is funded. Treat psychological injury as a mental health issue and it drifts to HR and the EAP renewal — the same downstream model the audit just marked as not effective. When recognised as a psychosocial risk, it belongs on the risk register, under the organisation's WHS obligations, managed by operations, and governed with the same discipline applied to physical safety.

The police force is not an outlier. It is an early, audited example of a model that is common across large multi-site employers: strong on the response, blind on the cause, and surprised every year when the bill grows. The number is $1.75 billion because nobody was watching upstream. The wrong question is "how do we improve our wellbeing support". The right one is "what known hazards are not being monitored, and could we defend that in front of an auditor".