1: Access a Mental Health First Aider - or become one!

One of our aims throughout 2024 has been developing a culture of Mental Health First Aid within Gateshead Health. With dozens of trained Mental Health First Aiders (MHFA) now working within the Trust, we’re building a network of colleagues who are trained in non-judgmental listening and signposting. These colleagues are available to contact when you’re in need of a listening ear, and can be found through our MHFA Listings.

Building on the good work done so far, we launched a dedicated one-day course for line managers earlier this year in acknowledgement of the significant impact line managers have on your experience at work and potentially your mental health. Training opportunities are available monthly, so whether you’re looking to book the line manager session or the two-day course for all, you can check availability and make a booking through our sign-up form.

On a positive note, we’re seeing some very positive results in areas that are more proactive, receptive and engaged in opportunities like our MHFA Training and Health and Wellbeing Ambassadorship. A great example of this can be seen in our Pharmacy Team, where we see good performance in some key health & wellbeing metrics compared to other areas.

For any further information on the survey, please get in touch with the survey team on [email protected].

2: Access psychological support

Ensuring that you can access psychological support in a manner that is timely can be to helping you stay well enough to remain at work – which in itself is proven to be beneficial for mental health. To this end, we’re now working with a range of different partners to help ensure that you can access support quickly, as and when it is required.

Elsewhere, we’re also working with Gateshead Talking Therapies more locally to direct those with a Gateshead address to their service, which can often provide support in a more timely manner than our internal service currently can. Taklking Therapy providers can also offer more varied and complex interventions, making them a potentially more suitable provider of psychological support. A full list of local Talking Therapy providers can be found via our Counselling page. Here, you’ll see more on the likes of NHS Practitioner Health; while signposting for counselling provisions related to more specific issues can also be found on individual support pages across the website. Examples include bereavement, domestic abuse and more.

3: Agree reasonable adjustments and make use of the tools available to prompt them

One of the most powerful way that the organisation and your line manager might be able to support you is through reasonable adjustments. Occupational Health will advise on adjustments related to the Equality Act as part of our organisational responsibility to remove any boundaries introduced by disability or long-term conditions. However, adjustments can also be made by line managers without any input from Occupational Health or People & OD, and can be a powerful tool for supporting staff in staying well at work.

To encourage this, a range of tools are able to help colleagues prompts such conversations with their line manager. Amongst these include the Carer’s Passport, Health Passport and Menopause Passport. Our passports are documents designed to be completed by a colleague and presented to a line manager, helping them to get a better understanding around how any conditions, experiences, symptoms or otherwise may impact you at work – and prompt further thought around reasonable adjustments that could be made to support you in staying well. In some cases, these might even be used and paired with support available through organisations like Maximus and Able Futures. who can provide up to nine months of practical mental health guidance, advice and support, and help you to access grants to pay for practical support at work.

Similarly, you might also request a Stress Risk Assessment from your manager, helping unearth drivers of stress and put building blocks in place to help remove, limit exposure to or be able to manage these more effectively. Elsewhere, health and wellbeing conversations might also provide a good opportunity to discuss changes – you can find out more about these further down in the list.

4: Know how to access the most effective crisis support

Knowing where to turn to when you are in crisis (or when you are supporting someone else who is in crisis) can be the difference between accessing support which is effective and helpful, and one which is disjointed and confusing.

Our recently-launched Crisis Support webpage aims to make it as straightforward as possible for you to understand the most effective and useful sources of support when experiencing mental health crisis. At the forefront of this is the new national urgent mental health support helpline, accessible by calling 111 and selecting option 2. This service is also complemented by 111 Online, a tool which can be used to assess symptoms and help you to understand the most effective and suitable service to access or step to take next.

Also found on our crisis support page is information on free specialist listening services from the likes of Samaritans and SHOUT, while a copy of our organisational guidance for supporting staff during times of crisis can also be found here – helping you understand the most effective routes to take to support a colleague in crisis. For those passionate about supporting others, we’d also advise taking a look at our Suicide Prevention page, where you’ll find information on a free 20-minute suicide prevention training course available through Zero Suicide Alliance amongst other resources.

5: Line Manager? Access our targeted support & make your life easier!

As mentioned above, we know that line managers have a significant impact on your experience at work – which can often be very explicitly linked to your feelings of wellbeing or mental health in the workplace. Data available shows us this too – with Staff Survey results showing us that colleagues in the same working areas can have dramatically differing experiences and feelings of wellbeing based their line manager.

This inconsistency is something we want to eliminate. To help do this, earlier this year we launched a new online Manager Support hub for all things wellbeing. Included here is information around opportunities for coaching, development and training and details about support available by internal teams such as Organisational Development.

But perhaps most useful of all is our Handy Guides for Managers page. Home to the aforementioned guide for supporting staff in crisis, this area is also home to a guide on matters including how to respond to rare but serious events such as traumatic incidents; a guide on managing stress-related illness & absence; guides on supporting colleagues experiencing symptoms of menopause; sickness absence toolkits; a guide outlining the expectations of you as a people manager including in relation to staff wellbeing and more.

Further work is planned in this area in the future as we begin to create ‘off-the-shelf’ wellbeing-focused sessions for managers to deliver within teams, while work is also underway elsewhere to build a new intranet area featuring resources to more effectively support managers in enacting our promoting and supporting attendance policy.

6: Have a Health and Wellbeing Conversation

All colleagues should have a health and wellbeing conversation, also referred to as a check-in, on at least an annual basis. Now reflected in annual appraisal documentation, wellbeing conversations will typically but not always take place with a line manager. Other people you might have a health and wellbeing check-in with include those who are suitably placed – for example, a health and wellbeing ambassador, mental health first aider, Chaplaincy team member and so on.

At Gateshead, we promote the idea that these conversations can be informal and needn’t be daunting. They should ideally focus on providing you with the opportunity to raise any concerns you might have, whether at home or at work. Again, this should serve to help the person you’re having the conversation with to better understand your support needs – helping them link you in with and signpost to any support they might be aware of as necessary. That being said, if you feel that you’d prefer a more structured or formal approach to a discussion, that can also be facilitated by the use of templates available on our check-ins page, including the Health & Wellbeing Check-In Activity Sheet and the Wellbeing Plan template.

Because you don’t necessarily need to have these conversations with a line manager, eLearning focusing on how to have these conversations safe and effectively is also available for all colleagues. This is accessible through ESR or by signing-up and logging-in to the NHS Learning Hub. If you’re passionate about supporting colleagues and helping us build a more supportive culture, please do enrol in the training, which takes only an hour or so.

7: Utilise the Zero Tolerance Support Hub if you've experienced unacceptable behaviour

Some of our most concerning 2023 Staff Survey Results centred around experiences of unacceptable behaviours in the workplace. Whether from patients or colleagues, prominence of behaviours including abuse, threats, homophobia, racism, sexual misconduct and more was a identified as a serious concern.

Reacting to this, the organisation launched its Zero Tolerance Campaign. Aimed at stamping out these behaviours at Gateshead, the campaign has seen the launch and revision of various organisational policies to help ensure better support is in place to both prevent and respond to instances of unacceptable behaviour.

Amongst work done in this project is the launch of the Zero Tolerance Support Hub, an area of our website which aims to make things as straightforward and easy as possible for those who have experienced unacceptable behaviours to understand how to report and receive targeted support around their experience. This is split into various different experiences (based on data we’ve seen from reporting). The area is still in development, but with much being live already, we want you to know that if you’ve experienced unacceptable behaviour from a colleague or a patient, or even at home, the organisation is there to support you.

8: Get Physical!

As outlined back in May and brought to life by our Mental Health First Aiders as part of Mental Health Awareness Week, moving more can be massive for our mental health, both as a preventative and responsive tool. Indeed, studies show regular exercise can reduce symptoms of depression by 30%, while research suggests that even just 10 minutes of brisk walking can increase mood and alertness by 20%.

Having completed a Health Needs Analysis as part of our Better Health At Work Award work, Gateshead colleagues told us that one of the most pressing things they were looking for from us as an organisation was more opportunities to get or stay physically active through the workplace. Since then, we’ve been able to expand our network of discounted gym membership partners, launch on-site pilates classes, create a staff netball team and are now on the verge of launching our on-site HIIT classes – due to go live in November.

We also know there are links between things like alcohol and smoking when it comes to mental health. To this end, we have a partnership with DrinkCoach which provides 6 free and confidential sessions with a qualified alcohol treatment specialist. Similarly, colleagues can access 12 weeks of free nicotine replacement therapy through our QE Facilities colleagues. A lot more physical wellbeing support information and resources can be found via our dedicated physical wellbeing area.

9: Get support with symptoms of menopause

The age and gender profile of our workforce makes menopause another key area of focus for us – but did you know that the number one most common symptom of menopause is actually anxiety?

As outlined in our Menopause Champions Training Session, menopause and mental health are much more closely linked than we might think. Accordingly, getting support with symptoms can be really important in helping us stay well while in the workplace. This might be through means such adjustments initiated through the previously-mentioned Menopause Passport, but also via support through your GP and accessing Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) products.

For more on how to get the most from GP appointments on the menopause, or even just to get a better idea of how to support the estimated 1 in 4 colleagues we believe are experiencing symptoms of menopause & peri-menopause at any given time, we heavily advice tuning in to our 1-hour training session.

10: Make your voice heard by completing the Staff Survey

And finally, mentioned repeatedly throughout this article is our understanding of issues thanks to data from the staff survey. We understand that being repeatedly asked for your thoughts and feedback can be frustrating at times – but hopefully the above list of support available is illustrative of just how useful and practical it can be!

Usefully enough, the 2024 Staff Survey went live on Monday 7th October. An invitation to complete your survey should now be in your inbox (search for ‘Staff Survey 2024: invitation’). Please do find and take the time to complete your survey this year, and help us build a better understanding around where our focus should be in the year ahead.

For any further information on the survey, please get in touch with the survey team on [email protected].