Hi, I think these are both great initiatives. At the start of the pandemic we introduced Emotional Wellbeing Champions at Nuffield Health. The champions have been supported with a 2 day Mental Health First Care training course and a series of communications and posters/bulletins and relevant topics to share with their teams. We now have a network of 260 champions across the business. Every month we host a discussion webinar to give updates, share experiences and offer further learning around something relevant e.g. grief and loss, sleep or stress. The purpose of the champions was to support our employees during the pandemic however we are now taking this further and offering a shorter course and programme of support for some of our customer facing employees too.

In terms of setting this up, we asked our sites to nominate at least one individual with the capacity, skill and interest in offering their support and then invited them to a webinar to understand the roles and responsibilities. Following training there is an assessment process to check understanding and then we continue the learning as above with the monthly input. We also have a Microsoft teams channel for updates or for queries where members of the support team are accessible as well as the full list of champions available and other self hep material on our ‘Healthy Work hub’. Just to add, we are extremely lucky that we have our own internal Emotional Wellbeing experts who are able to deliver the ongoing training and support.  It is a great initiative, the employees have taken great value from it and continue to do so, I am hopeful we have been able to help many of our team throughout the challenging 12 months. Good luck with your roll out.

Hi Heather,

At Westminster City Council we have Wellbeing Pioneers. Our wellbeing movement started in May 2019 and we now have approx. 70 Wellbeing Pioneers. The Wellbeing Pioneers group is a multi-disciplinary group, with representation from all directorates and areas within the organisation. When we were first starting out, we ran a few Wellbeing Champions training sessions; these were a day long and delivered by New Leaf Health (happy to supply contact details, if you would find this helpful then please feel free to email me directly: ncaesar@westminster.gov.uk).

We tried to keep the role very loose as this aligns with the ‘Everyone is a Leader’ pillar of our Westminster Way of working; and this is also a voluntary role on top of the Wellbeing Pioneers’ day-to-day responsibilities. Following some feedback where the Wellbeing Pioneers felt they would like a bit more direction, we created a document entitled ‘The Pioneers Purpose & Information Pack’. This document outlines the role of the Wellbeing Pioneer and sets the expectations of them.

We meet for 50 minutes once a month to provide updates, share knowledge and plan initiatives for major health and wellbeing awareness campaigns.

In November 2020 we started to train MHFAs, and we have trained 4 cohorts so far. We are quite new on the MHFA journey so nothing to report on that front yet.

I hope this helps!