Mental Health Awareness Week & My Healthy Advantage
It’s Mental Health Awareness Week and this year’s theme is about loneliness, which given the events over the last few years is incredibly relevant. Part of our ongoing commitment to ensuring we provide quality care to the people we support is to ensure we’re caring for our wonderful carers and staff too. Mental Health Issues in the UK affect 1 in every 6 of us, but that’s not the entire number. That’s just the issues we’re aware of, the real number could be much higher.
As a nation, we’re becoming more and more aware of potential mental health issues, noticing more and more when a colleague is looking a bit upset or a friend needs a hand. We have a duty of care, to do more for our staff. Rochcare has committed to taking a forward step to helping our team’s well-being.
How do we do it? By providing a place where individual staff can take a moment to breathe and self reflect. That’s why we partner with Health Assured by utilising their My Healthy Advantage app! My Healthy Advantage is a free downloadable app that helps our staff look after their Wellness and Wellbeing by increasing engagement with healthier activities and providing recognition and rewards for completing their preset goals. The MHA app has everything from articles covering sensitive topics, guided breathing techniques to help improve focus and even Spotify curated playlists to help keep your mood up and your blood pumping.
By utilising mini health checks and mood trackers, our staff can monitor their habits and notice any behaviours that may be changing negatively and action them before they cause further harm. Alternatively, staff may be well aware of some negative habits they may already have and look to the 4-week plans available intended to help promote positive behaviours and reduce highlighted concerns. Mental health is a delicate and personal subject so it is often hard to come to your colleagues, friends or families when it truly matters, the MHA app utilises anonymous chats to help work through any concerns. We always remind our staff that the option is available to them if they need it in our monthly staff newsletter.
Alongside this, there’s a free 24-hour confidential hotline that exists to help our staff deal with any emerging issue they feel has become detrimental to their mental health. The counsellors are trained to help our staff navigate a number of issues including but not limited to bereavement, legal concerns, family issues and substance abuse.
If you’re feeling concerned about your mental health, please check some of our links below to help bring yourself back to tip-top shape!
https://www.rochdalemind.org.uk/
https://www.nhs.uk/mental-health/self-help/
https://www.manchestermind.org/our-services/wellbeing-hub/