Everyone deserves a safe way back to work.
NAPSDM sets the standard for ethical, evidence-informed, psychologically safe disability management in Canada. The charter marks your commitment to it.
“Successful and sustainable return to work depends on the interaction of health, workplace conditions, psychologically safe practices, and effective disability management.”The board-agreed framing line
The system assesses the diagnosis. It does not assess the workplace.
Canada’s disability system decides whether a person is fit to return to work through a medical lens: diagnosis, functional capacity, clinical checkboxes. It does not assess the workplace the person is returning to, and that omission is the error.
A psychologically unsafe workplace halts healing. When the receiving workplace is unsafe, a return does not heal. It harms.
A workplace is never neutral in a recovery. It is either part of the injury or part of the recovery.
Many workers are navigating two things at once: an illness or injury, and the psychological impact of how their organization responded to it. Recovery is shaped by leadership behaviour, organizational culture, communication, procedural fairness, and exposure to workplace psychological hazards, none of which appear on a functional capacity form.
This is not a small problem, and it is not only a human one.
The annual cost of poor mental health in Canada, up from an inflation-adjusted $67B in 2011.
Carried by employers: disability claims, wage replacement, benefits, overtime, accommodations, turnover and compliance.
Projected annual cost by 2050 if nothing changes, close to a fifth of the country's projected economy.
SourceMorawczynski, Dobson and Howatt, The Economic Cost of Mental Health in Canada, CSA Public Policy Centre, 2026.
Employers carry the larger share of a cost that is driven by the very thing the system does not measure.
To make disability management in Canada ethical, evidence-informed, and biopsychosocial.
Grounded in the finding that recovery and sustainable return to work depend on the interaction of health, workplace conditions, leadership, and disability management processes.
Psychological safety is a foundational condition for healing, resilience, and sustainable return to work. The workplace, its leaders and supervisors, and the systems that support return to work all play decisive, and too often ignored, roles in recovery.
Free for the people we serve. Public for everyone.
Every claim we publish traces to a source you can check. Workers and claimants are never charged for anything we make. No fee, no proof asked, ever.
Read it today
Being built
Money buys standing. It never buys a voice in what the standard says.
Five people are in every return to work.
A return involves a worker, a supervisor, an employer, a practitioner and a clinician, and each of them sees a different part of it. There is a page for each, written from where they stand.
The standard, in eight principles.
A founding charter, signed by our board, guides everything we publish and everything we will teach. The person, not the file, sits at its centre.
Principle 01Disability is biopsychosocial.
Principle 02Psychological safety is not optional.
Principle 03The workplace and the supervisor are the real predictors.
Principle 04Disability management must be ethical.
Principle 05A claimant is a person, not a file.
Principle 06Competence is a duty.
Principle 07Disability management is trauma-informed.
Principle 08Recovery is a shared responsibility.
Disability management, psychological safety, trauma-informed practice, and lived experience, at the same table.
Most organizations in this field come from one discipline. We come from several, on purpose. Our board spans disability claims operations, workers' compensation, clinical trauma therapy, human rights adjudication, organizational leadership, and lived experience of both deciding claims and living through them.
That combination is uncommon in Canada, and it is the reason we can say what good looks like across the whole process rather than one slice of it.
Independence here is a rule, not a claim. No one advises an organization and then assesses it. Advise or assess, never both. It is written into our conflict-of-interest policy, and the standard and our annual report are never sponsored.
Some carriers are already moving this way. They are not the problem, they are the proof, and they are who we build with.
NAPSDM is a federal not-for-profit corporation, incorporated in 2026 under the Canada Not-for-profit Corporations Act, Corporation No. 1808118-2, with its registered office in Hamilton, Ontario.
Not blame. A standard.
Meet the founding board, and how we stay independentIf you want the standard to exist, help make it.
The charter is public and so is the evidence under it. Nothing here is behind a login, and workers are never charged for anything we make.
In crisis? You do not have to wait for any of this.
If you are in immediate danger, call 911. To talk to someone now, call or text 9-8-8, Canada’s Suicide Crisis Helpline, any time, in English or French.
Provincial and territorial crisis lines, including Indigenous-specific lines, are on our crisis page.