Table 4 The three challenges
The wellbeing agenda | Assisting employees to thrive at work. Wellbeing is about feeling good and functioning well and is influenced by each person’s experience of life. In practical terms organisations should provide: |
Interventions to sustain the wellbeing of members who are thriving and enable them to move on towards flourishing through engaging members in their own emotional and cognitive development | |
A programme of workplace development that: | |
Is informed by awareness of the kinds of primary and secondary stressors that members face | |
Endeavours to reduce the primary stressors to a minimum | |
Responds to and remedies the secondary stressors that impact member | |
A plan for developing teams and teamwork and integrating personal, team and workplace support programmes | |
Recognition of the nature and impacts of secondary stressors and reducing their impacts on members | |
Ease of access for members who may have more serious and persistent problems to specialised mental healthcare | |
The psychosocial agenda | Supporting staff who are struggling |
The distress that staff experience and the dysfunction and disorders they risk are similar to the conditions that affect survivors of significant and major incidents | |
Yet, staff may feel stigmatised by recognising or showing the emotions they experience and any problems they develop. Staff who experience distress that persists for more than two weeks after a significant event should receive assessments of their needs | |
Psychosocial care describes interventions for people who are distressed or struggling or have symptoms of mental health problems that do not reach a diagnosis whether or not they also suffer social or work dysfunction. This includes encouraging departments to create peer support programmes for members who are struggling | |
The mental health agenda | Enabling people whose needs appear to go beyond struggling to access mental healthcare, recover and return to work |
Employers may need to negotiate service level agreements with mental health providers |