Built from what we saw at the end of the road.

Angie Montgomery was the psychologist in a chronic pain clinic at the end of the road in the workers compensation scheme. Her patients arrived five or more years after injury, with medication lists as long as their case files, worn down as much by the process that followed as by the injury itself. The clinic could retrain pain systems that a decade of surgery and opioids had not, but every recovery was also a record of harm allowed to compound, and the queue behind it only grew.

Most people see this problem from one seat; Angie has sat in several. Inside the scheme she saw what work does to a person, and what psychological injury does to an insurance model built for broken bones. In consulting she watched capable organisations forced to guess: bullying complaints answered with bullying training, exhaustion with wellness sessions. And, more at home in a statistical model than a therapist’s chair, she could see that what they needed was already inside them, in systems never built to be read together.

Almost no one works across all four of those worlds: health psychology, insurance, workplace mental health and data science. That is less a claim about her than about where the problem sits: in the space between established fields, and the space between fields is where obvious things go unbuilt.

When Australia made psychosocial health and safety a legal duty, most organisations read it as an obligation to meet. Angie recognised the outline of something she had spent a career assembling, and built SafeMinds: a proprietary methodology for measuring the organisational conditions that shape psychological health at work, with the analytics and purpose-built platform to apply it consistently at scale. A leadership team can use it to establish where the organisation stands, which gaps are material and what should happen next. She chose health psychology because it was the only discipline devoted to preventing harm rather than treating it; SafeMinds is that choice carried to scale.

Angie holds a Doctorate in Health Psychology from Deakin University, Melbourne, and is registered with AHPRA as a Health Psychologist.

Telstra Health Brilliant Women in Digital Health Award · Winner 2022  ·  Innovator of the Year, Women in Digital Awards · Finalist 2023