It’s been quite a few months since the Mind Matters team connected with delegates who attended the Health & Wellbeing at Work Conference 2020 in Birmingham. The Conference now seems worlds away in terms of time, change, learning to adapt, and images such as that of Dame Carol Black’s keynote featured in this post – a congregation of people which would now risk our health and incur a hefty fine!
Some of our contacts we’ve met at previous Health & Wellbeing at Work Conferences, when the experiences of 2020 would have been something we would only have faced in the movies or in our nightmares. We have all weathered the storm of the Covid-19 pandemic, albeit in different boats, and we hope you have all been able to remain safe and well during this time.
The clients that Mind Matters works with are facing various different challenges right now, whether it is supporting healthy home-working, managing health during and beyond re-structure and redundancy risk, helping ‘Furloughed’ employees return to work, or helping work forces to stay well with the various other challenges they face around the virus. Employers are having to consider how they will manage the fall-out of unhelpful coping behaviours, including increased use of alcohol, addiction, and other risks associated with these e.g. Health and Safety. The needs of our work force have changed dramatically and quickly. As you will see in this graph produced by the Centre for Mental Health from their recent research, the future prospects for our ‘mental health need’ do not look rosy.
Mind Matters is calling on workplace communities, schools, and societies to act now to ‘flatten the mental health curve’ early on. Poor mental health is not inevitable, even following a global crisis such as Covid-19. We can sustain, manage, and improve it through effective early intervention, meeting needs as early as possible in order to reduce need and risk of crisis further down the line, and of course the financial and societal costs associated with failure to address need. Whether you are a clinical professional, commissioner of services, employer, employee, volunteer, or community worker, YOU have the power to shape the curve in just the same way that we were all called upon to ‘flatten the curve’ of Covid-19.
Mind Matters continues to offer mental health and suicide prevention training services to a whole host of different communities on a national and global level. We can offer these both on-line and face-to-face (where social distancing measures can be achieved, and risk effectively managed) and we can offer both in-house and open courses for individual delegates. As a business we have adapted to meet our client needs, and adapted to keep our Associates and Employees safe and well. We have expanded our portfolio of online training courses and would like to share with you the details of a newly adopted course called i-ACT (for Positive Mental Health) online Training for Managers, and for Employees/Frontline Workers. The i-ACT courses have in the last two weeks also been accredited by the Royal College of Psychiatrists adding to their credibility as a great intervention to help flatten the ‘mental health need’ curve
#flattenthementalhealthcurve