Championing Mental Health
The 12th-18th May is Mental Health Awareness Week, a campaign that was created by the Mental Health Foundation to raise awareness of conditions that contribute to or affect people’s mental wellbeing. These seven days are also used to promote ways that people can live healthier and happier lives. Cat Convey, Advance’s Complex Needs Lead, discusses the work Advance does to promote the mental health and wellbeing of its customers.
I’ve been working as Advance’s Complex Needs Lead for two and a half years, advocating for quality mental health support for both customers and team members. During this time, I’ve been working to develop initiatives and resources so that everyone at Advance is properly supported with the tools to maintain their mental health.
We’ll be getting involved with Mental Health Awareness Week in a variety of ways – one of which is Wear it Green Day, an initiative also created by the Mental Health Foundation. We’d love you to don your favourite green outfit – green hats, t-shirts, socks, shoes and everything in between are welcome!
You can really get creative with this and spend some time in a green environment. Being amongst nature is one of the most beneficial things you can do for your mental health, so why not grab some friends and go for a walk, or maybe buy a new plant for your home?
The theme for this years’ Mental Health Awareness Week is ‘community’, so any activities that bring people together are very much encouraged!
There are two virtual mental health cafés being run during Mental Health Awareness Week, on the 12th and 15th of May. This is a place for you to have a chat, see some friendly faces and hear about mental health tips. Email Jacqueline.Russon@advanceuk.org to save your place!
We’re also introducing Time to Talk, where we’d like staff to use keyworker sessions throughout May to speak to customers about how things are going for them. It’s important that we give customers time to talk about how they’re feeling, what’s working well, what they would like to be different and their goals for the future. Key worker sessions are vital to ensure we continue to provide safe and effective support to customers. Mental Health Awareness Week is an ideal opportunity to use key worker sessions to focus in on mental health and support customers towards fulfilling and happy lives.
Time to Talk isn’t just limited to customers – we’re encouraging all Advance team members to take part in supervision discussions, so that you’ve got the opportunity to let us know what’s going on with you, discuss any challenges that you’re facing in and outside of work and helping you find solutions for them.
Continuing with the internal support, we’d also like to highlight our Employee Assistance Programme. Often, as care workers, we spend lots of time prioritising other people and often forget to look after ourselves. This programme is a free and anonymous service for Advance staff and their families to access at any time.
The service is provided by Care First and is based on Cognitive Behaviour Therapy. You can speak to a trained mental health professional at a time and place that suits you. You can also access an app full of resources and mental health tips, as well as its weekly webinar programme, its Lifestyle platform and structured counselling sessions.
We understand that working in health and social care can sometimes be turbulent, so we encourage all Advance staff to access debrief sessions. Post-incident support and debriefs are recommended practices that help people in health and social care settings to recover and learn from a distressing incident.
Good quality post-incident support and debriefs help people feel safe and secure and allow people to reflect on why things happened as they did, what went well, what didn’t go well, identify next steps, or what they could do differently next time. We want to be able to support people to understand themselves and each other better, which will improve communication and outcomes for customers, families and staff.
Finally, and in time for Mental Health Awareness Week, Advance is proud to announce the launch of a new A-Z directory of online resources to support the mental health and wellbeing of our customers. The directory has been made available to colleagues in the Toolkit section of the Intranet. It is packed full of information and self-help resources on a wide range of topics from anxiety to young people.
We hope you’ll join us in getting involved with Mental Health Awareness Week so that we can continue to be a champion for positive mental health practices and help to encourage everyone to access support when they need it.