Last year the Laura Hyde Foundation made huge progress on our goals to transform the mental health landscape for emergency services and healthcare professionals, amidst a challenging 2020 where the importance of our work became clearer than ever.
Some key achievements included:
- Launching our clinically supervised, independent and free of charge set of support services alongside our trusted partners, helping over 8,000 individuals with their mental health
- Appointed co-chair and board member of the Nurse and Midwife Suicide Prevention and Police Suicide Prevention Groups respectively.
- Securing press coverage with over 100 media outlets including live television and radio
- Sending out over 1200 charity care packages to different frontline workplaces within the UK
- Creating our No Mask For Mental Health campaign with great engagement and success
To build on the momentum from 2020 we have identified a few key areas for us to prioritise in 2021:
1) Proactive Support & Intervention
- Drive all NHS Trusts and workplaces to have preventative (rather than reactive) strategies in place to “catch” mental health issues before they manifest
- Ensure a board level mental health champion is on every NHS Trust to demonstrate commitment to staff wellbeing
- Embed mental health and staff wellbeing support criteria into trust inspections so that mental health initiatives form part of the evaluation process
2) Education & Awareness
- Create and distribute educational content to form part of a mental health syllabus and promote within universities to reach future medical professionals
- Support the training of middle management in workplaces with a focus on prevention, early identification and education
- Provide video content to establishments to complement and enhance existing mental health provisions
- Generate further public awareness of the specific challenges facing frontline staff, particularly in light of the Covid-19 pandemic
- Push for further destigmatisation of mental health to facilitate an open dialogue for seeking help
3) Data & Action
- Improve data collection for medical sickness absence and suicide to gain a more accurate understanding of the scale of the problem
- Use data to understand specific challenges relating to mental health to inform and recommend the changes required to combat them
- Continue steering and collaborating with cross entity groups (e.g. National Working Group for Prevention of Police Suicide & National Working Group for Prevention of Suicide in Nurses and Midwives) to obtain national data to inform strategies and policies
4) Support Students/Early Career cohort
- Determine specific support requirements for students and early career group who have been severely impacted by the pandemic
- Ensure adequate peer support networks are in place for those who have largely been studying remotely, with access to further mentoring
- Identify those students or junior staff who have had to prematurely assist on the front line in response to the pandemic, to reinforce and improve the mental health support available
- Continue promoting best mental health and wellbeing practices within learning institutions and workplaces to ensure staff are properly supported at the start of their career to encourage good mental health “habits”