A Guide to Mental Health First Aid Training

A business can only thrive when its people are thriving. That’s why more and more companies are taking a proactive, whole-organisation approach to mental health. This means building the resilience, wellbeing and productivity of all employees, whilst also supporting those with new or existing mental health difficulties.

Companies are doing this through improved culture, management, policies and communications, but for many businesses, the first step is training. By training your employees in mental health, you’ll :

1. Build understanding and reduce stigma. By lifting the lid on the mental health taboo, you’ll create a more inclusive and fair workplace. Mental health will be acknowledged as central to personal wellbeing and work performance, and employees will be more likely to disclose their difficulties. As an organisation, you’ll be better able to set strategy, mitigate risk and improve culture.
2. Encourage self-awareness and improve wellbeing. Like with physical health, we all have mental health and are sometimes more vulnerable to illness. Increased awareness of our own mental health and how to look after it helps employees to take greater responsibility for their wellbeing. A healthy workforce is a more productive and engaged one.
3. Upskill your employees to spot the signs of mental ill health. Giving your employees information about what to look out for helps them to pay more attention to changes in their colleagues. The sooner we spot that someone is struggling, the quicker we can start a conversation, prevent difficulties from worsening and encourage recovery.
4. Give your employees the confidence to provide support. So often we say nothing for fear of saying the wrong thing, but well-honed listening skills can empower people to appropriately support, comfort and signpost their colleagues to professional help.
5. Encourage recovery and keep people in work. Informed colleagues can offer hope that recovery is probable. Work offers us structure, relationships and purpose, and it can be key to our wellbeing. and it can be a key part of a person’s recovery. With reasonable adjustments, you can help someone to stay in work as they progress through their recovery.

At Heart of the City we regularly host one-day mental health training sessions for members with Noa Burger. Noa runs a workplace wellbeing consultancy that provides a wide range of mental health training courses, one to one wellbeing mentoring and strategic guidance for businesses.  Mental Health First Aid is one approach and includes half-day awareness-raising sessions, one-day champions training and a two-day course that qualifies attendees as Mental Health First Aiders. You can also Mental Health First Aid Training with MHFA England and St John Ambulance. In 2018, the Health and Safety Executive recommended that employers consider training their employees in Mental Health First Aid as part of their first aid approach. This is believed to be a first step towards future legislation.

This was last updated in August 2023 by Noa Burger for Heart of the City. We’ve created these resources for individual SMEs to use. None of our content is to be adapted, reused or repurposed for commercial use.