Celebrating World Mental Health Day

Mental health in the workplace is this year’s theme for World Mental Health Day (Tuesday 10th October 2017).

Essex Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust (EPUT) will be participating in a number of events this week:

• A Health Fair on Tuesday, at the Cliffs Pavilion Theatre on Station Road from 10am to 3pm,
• Launch of the Black, Asian, Minority, Ethnic (BAME) Network to promote equality and diversity across the Trust on Wednesday
• Launch of an Essex-wide Perinatal service on Thursday
• On Tue 10th October, our Employment Specialists and HeadsUp Peer Support Workers, with Essex County Council’s Adult Mental Health and Wellbeing Team, will be in and around County Hall in Chelmsford promoting mental health in the workplace.

The perinatal service will provide support and treatment for pregnant women and new mums who may be experiencing mental health problems during the perinatal period (from conception up to the baby’s first birthday).

In celebrating this year’s theme of mental health in the workplace, EPUT is highlighting two of its services: Employment Service, delivered in partnership with the charity Employ-Ability and HeadsUp an Enable East programme.  Both services support people who have experienced mental illness back into the work place.

The Employment Service is very well established and has been running for many years and each year helps hundreds of patients to either find work or retain it.

717 people were helped to find or retain employment or into other vocational activity in 2016 / 17. So far, in 2017/18, we have already helped more than 450 people.

EPUT was amongst the first five organisations to be recognised as a ‘National Centre of Excellence’ by the Centre for Mental Health for its Employment Specialist service.

The team’s outlook is ‘anyone who wants to work, with the right support, can work’.

An important aspect of the Employment Specialists work is engaging local employers, helping them to be ‘Disability Confident’, giving people with lived experience of mental ill health a fair opportunity. They also carry the message ‘looking after the mental health of your workforce leads to better productivity and performance’.

HeadsUp, which is managed by Enable East, uses a focused one-to-one peer support approach and is fully funded by the Big Lottery Fund and European Social Fund.

Emphasis is placed on addressing and working through how participants feel about returning to work emotionally and the impact it can have on their mental health.

The peer support workers employed by the project have all experienced mental health problems themselves so have a real understanding of the impact mental health can have on a person’s journey back to work. Dawn, a HeadsUp peer support worker said the participants she has worked with so far have gained a “great deal of confidence in their ability to apply for jobs – they’ll be able to say what their strengths are and how to develop themselves further.”

Participants take part in three interactive workshops which explore mental well-being and resilience, looking at how something that makes one person feel good can have the opposite effect on the next person and that there is no ‘one size fits all’ solution to feeling and being ‘well’. They also focus on the positive benefits having a job can bring, how to handle stepping outside of comfort zones, and help participants to set personal goals and aspirations for the future.

Participants so far have described the workshops as ‘helpful and fun’ with over 80% saying they would recommend them to others.