Work Wellness Support for Implementing Mental Health First Aid 

The support contract is normally priced at a consultancy day rate.  If the scope and brief is clear enough then it is possible to agree to a fixed price for delivery. 

With the commercials agreed, we will work through your appointed contacts to start delivering benefits.  They will normally be:

• A trained or candidate Champion; a senior decision maker with authority to help keep the programme on track.
• One or more of your trained or candidate First Aiders (internal subject matter experts and resource investigators).

There will be different ambitions for what your investment in mental health first aid will deliver; from falling flat on its face to “world beating”.  So it is essential to take a short amount of time to define what success will look like.  Three inputs will help create this definition:

1. Current state assessment, ambitions and investment appetite of the key stakeholders in your organisation.
2. Two hour practice workshop(s) with your trained or candidate Mental Health First Aiders and Champions.  An opportunity for them to meet and share their experiences; good and bad.
3. Work Wellness experience across other organisations and practitioners and trends in good practice and regulation.

Gaining agreement to this definition from key stakeholders is important, but in our experience, it shouldn’t sit on the critical path and slow down progress.

• What Policies are already in place and would benefit from amendment and what gaps need to be addressed through new Policies?
• What are the existing methods for communicating mental health support to employees?
• What in-house promotion already exists to raise mental health awareness, e.g., an events calendar, use of 3rd parties and materials (lots of good materials are available free for re-use)?

Where we define; rules, standards and responsibilities, e.g.,

• Expectations and boundaries of the relevant roles (Employees, First Aiders, Champions, Mental Health aware colleagues).
• The appropriate mix of: Mental Health First Aiders, Champions and Aware colleagues and the ideal candidates for these roles from amongst your workforce.
• How and when employees should seek Mental Health First Aid.
• Disclosure: protecting confidentiality whilst also protecting the safety of the employee, other employees and the legal and moral obligations of the organisation.

Our recommendations will be “implementation ready”; the Policies will have already been written and the promotion event calendar will have already been planned.

We can commence implementation as soon as agreement to proceed is confirmed by Policy and Budget owners.

We will work through your appointed contact (typically one of your First Aiders or Champions) to deliver Policy standards and expectations including:

• Recruit and train your Mental Health First Aiders and Champions.
• Announce the First Aiders and Champions to your workforce
• Ongoing communication of mental health support and signposting to support services, e.g., on induction, in staff handbook, on company intranet and notice boards.
• Agree the timing, media and content of promotional events, ensuring we leverage the national awareness calendar, e.g., Mental Health Awareness Week, Time to Talk Day, World Mental Health Day.
• Manage and coordinate experience and good practice knowledge sharing among the Mental Health First Aiders and Champions.

We will review the adequacy of Policies and feed conclusions back into the benchmark standards, e.g., Do the standards need to be re-calibrated? Is there more work to be done to achieve the standards?

We will review the success of promotional activities to improve the timing, content and execution of promotional events.