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.