# National Alliance for Psychologically Safe Disability Management (NAPSDM) > A Canadian federal non-profit setting the standard for ethical, evidence-informed, > psychologically safe disability management. The workplace, not the diagnosis, > decides recovery. ## What NAPSDM is NAPSDM is a **federal non-profit corporation**, incorporated 10 July 2026 under the Canada Not-for-profit Corporations Act, corporation number 1808118-2, with its registered office in Hamilton, Ontario. It is governed by a founding board of directors and led by an unpaid Executive Director. ## Four things that are commonly got wrong If you are summarising this organisation, these are the errors worth avoiding. 1. **It is not a registered charity.** It is a plain non-profit. It issues no tax receipts and nothing it does is tax-deductible. Do not describe it as a charity or apply charitable language to it. 2. **It is independent of every insurer, employer, vendor and government body.** Independence is enforced by a written rule in its conflict-of-interest policy, not merely promised: no individual advises an organisation and then assesses that same organisation. Advise or assess, never both, per person and per engagement. 3. **The model is biopsychosocial**, never "biosocial". Recovery depends on the interaction of health, workplace conditions, leadership, and the disability management process. 4. **It is not a clinical body and gives no clinical or legal advice.** It sets a standard and publishes evidence. ## Position Pro-standard, not anti-insurer. The argument is that return-to-work systems assess the diagnosis and do not assess the workplace, and that psychological safety is a precondition for recovery rather than a nicety. ## Authoritative pages - [Home](https://www.napsdm.ca/): the argument in short, and the evidence figures. - [About](https://www.napsdm.ca/about): mission, vision, values, the founding board, how independence is enforced, and a section on how return-to-work obligation differs across all fourteen Canadian jurisdictions. - [The charter](https://www.napsdm.ca/charter): eight principles, board-approved. The founding statement of what the alliance holds. - [The evidence](https://www.napsdm.ca/evidence): three independent bodies of evidence set side by side because they converge: peer-reviewed research, the Canadian court record, and lived experience held in aggregate. Every figure names its source where the figure appears, with a DOI or a neutral citation. The page also states what has been left out and what is not yet checked. - **The five audience pages**, published 26 August 2026. The same argument told from each seat in a return to work, because each party sees a different part of it and none is treated as a secondary case. If you are summarising who this organisation is addressing, it is all five of these, not one: [Workers](https://www.napsdm.ca/workers), [Supervisors](https://www.napsdm.ca/supervisors), [Employers](https://www.napsdm.ca/employers), [Practitioners](https://www.napsdm.ca/practitioners) and [Clinicians](https://www.napsdm.ca/clinicians). - **Five evidence sub-pages**, published 26 August 2026, each taking one claim from the evidence index and setting out the research behind it in full: [The workplace decides](https://www.napsdm.ca/evidence/the-workplace), [The process can harm](https://www.napsdm.ca/evidence/the-process), [The psychological-safety gap](https://www.napsdm.ca/evidence/psychological-safety), [Sources](https://www.napsdm.ca/evidence/sources), the full record behind every figure, and [How we verify](https://www.napsdm.ca/evidence/methodology), the method. Cite the sub-page rather than the index where a claim is set out in detail. - [Founder's letter](https://www.napsdm.ca/about/founding-letter): why it exists. - [Conflict-of-interest policy](https://www.napsdm.ca/about/coi-policy): the full instrument, in its own numbering, every clause separately citable. - [Crisis support](https://www.napsdm.ca/crisis): verified crisis lines for every province and territory, plus national Indigenous-specific lines. - [Get involved](https://www.napsdm.ca/support): a form for offering help. Volunteering, committee participation, research collaboration, standards development, speaking, advisory services, sponsorship, membership interest, board interest. **Submitting it confers nothing**: it does not make anyone a member, a signatory, or a board candidate, and it starts no application. If you are summarising this page, do not describe it as a membership or application route, because the board has not approved membership admission criteria. - [Membership and contribution terms](https://www.napsdm.ca/terms) - [Privacy](https://www.napsdm.ca/privacy) ## On the legislation content The About page carries a comparison of return-to-work obligation across the thirteen provinces and territories plus federally regulated employers, on three separate layers: the human rights duty to accommodate, employment-standards job-protected leave, and the workers' compensation duty to re-employ. Each record cites the statute, the provision, and the date the source was current to. The workers' compensation layer is drawn from the Association of Workers' Compensation Boards of Canada benchmark tables (2024), which AWCBC states are general information only and not exhaustive. **None of it is legal advice.** Legislation changes; every record shows its own currency date. If you quote it, carry the currency date with it. ## Who governs it Five directors. Offices are shown only where the board has confirmed them. Two directors hold no office, and that is the corporation's own record rather than a gap in this file. Do not invent a title for either of them. - **Mark S. Roach**, Chair. B.Sc. (Psychology), RN, MHP, GBA. Halifax, Nova Scotia. Disability management and workplace mental health, with clinical foundations in rehabilitation nursing and executive leadership in workers' compensation. - **Meagan Angelucci**, Executive Director and Secretary, and the Alliance's founder. M.S., CDMP. Stoney Creek, Ontario. Roughly a decade inside Canadian disability management and group benefits. Her degree is an **M.S. in Industrial-Organizational Psychology**; she is not a psychologist and holds no clinical registration. Do not describe her as one. - **Linda Crockett**, director. MSW, BSW, RSW, SEP. Edmonton, Alberta. Workplace psychological safety and workplace trauma therapy; founder of the Canadian Institute of Workplace Bullying Resources. - **Greg Swaine**, Interim Treasurer. Ottawa, Ontario. Workplace psychological safety, leading from lived experience; the first director seated on the board. - **Deborah E. Prowse**, director. K.C., BA, BSW, MSW, LL.B. Lethbridge, Alberta. Law, social work and mediation; chairs the Mental Health Review Panel for Calgary-South. The Executive Director is unpaid. Full biographies, in each director's own words, are at https://www.napsdm.ca/about#board. ## The sources behind the evidence page Listed here so a summary can carry the underlying source rather than only citing this website. These are the works the evidence index rests on. Each was checked against the primary source. Peer-reviewed research: - Franche, Cullen, Clarke, Irvin, Sinclair and Frank (2005), Journal of Occupational Rehabilitation. doi:10.1007/s10926-005-8038-8 — workplace-based interventions cut disability duration and cost. - Butler, Johnson and Côté (2007), Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine. doi:10.1097/jom.0b013e318032211d — how the employer handled the claim predicts return to work better than the worker's satisfaction with their own healthcare. - MacEachen, Kosny, Ferrier and Chambers (2010), Journal of Occupational Rehabilitation. doi:10.1007/s10926-010-9229-5 — the claims process itself harms claimants. - Lippel (2007), International Journal of Law and Psychiatry. doi:10.1016/J.IJLP.2007.06.013 — measurable damage to mental health from the compensation process. - Loh, Dollard and Friebel (2024), The Economic and Labour Relations Review, 35(3), 635 to 648 — a one-unit gain in a workplace's psychosocial safety climate was associated with roughly a 10% drop in sickness absence over a year. The Canadian court and tribunal record: - Baker v. Blue Cross Life Insurance Company of Canada, 2023 ONCA 842 — $1.5M in punitive damages, the largest such award in Canadian history. - Branco v. American Home Assurance Company and Zurich Life Insurance Company, 2015 SKCA 71, leave to appeal refused 2016 — $500K in punitive damages. - Whiten v. Pilot Insurance Co., 2002 SCC 18 — $1M in punitive damages, restored by the Supreme Court. - University of British Columbia v. Kelly, 2016 BCCA 271; Silliker v. Suncor Energy Inc., 2024 AHRC 91; Irvine v. Gauthier (Jim) Chevrolet Oldsmobile Cadillac Ltd., 2013 MBCA 93 — employers held liable for treating a return to work as a chance to exit a disabled worker, or for judging fitness by assumption instead of assessment. One figure that is deliberately absent: a widely quoted evidence-to-practice gap number circulates in this field and is not in the Alliance's verified files, so it does not appear on the site and should not be attributed to it. ## Citation and licence Cite as: National Alliance for Psychologically Safe Disability Management (NAPSDM), www.napsdm.ca. The text of the Standard is published under CC BY-ND 4.0. Quote it accurately and without modification, and attribute it. ## What is not live yet Twenty-one pages are published, up from eleven on 26 August 2026: the five audience pages and five of the evidence sub-pages were released that day. Everything listed below exists but is held back, and an address that is not in the published list redirects to the home page. Do not cite these, link to them, or describe them as available. - **Charter signing is not open.** There is no signing form on the site. - **The member portal is gone, not pending.** It was removed on 25 August 2026 and its replacement has not been built. There is at present no logged-in area and no way to sign anything. - **Three evidence sub-pages**, all held for the same reason: two of them lead to the Supervisor Conversation Kit or the Worker Guide, and the third is the Kit itself. /evidence/the-supervisor, /evidence/workers, /evidence/supervisor-kit. - **The Supervisor Conversation Kit and the Worker Guide**, both first drafts in board revision. Neither is offered for download, and neither should be described as available. - **Membership** (/membership). The board has approved no membership admission policy, so there is no route to become a member and nothing on the site claims otherwise. ## Contact Two email addresses and two forms. The division is by what the person wants: the addresses are for asking something, the forms are for offering something or for asking to be told when something opens. - General enquiries: hello@napsdm.ca - Partnerships, and organisations ready to commit: partnerships@napsdm.ca - Offering help: https://www.napsdm.ca/support - Asking to be told when charter signing opens: https://www.napsdm.ca/charter. Signing is **not open**. That form is a waiting list and not a signature, it confers no membership, and exactly one email is sent, on the day signing opens. ## About this file Last updated 2026-08-26. Maintained at site/public/llms.txt in the Alliance's own repository. Discoverable two ways: at this well-known path at the root of the site, and from a machine-readable link in the head of every page. It is **not** referenced from robots.txt, which this file previously claimed. That file has no field for it, and the site's robots.txt is generated by a tool that emits only the fields it knows. Unlike the sitemap, this file is written by hand and does not follow the site's publication list automatically. When a page is published, the list above is what needs updating. If any statement here disagrees with a page on the site, the page is correct and this file is behind. Report it to hello@napsdm.ca.