As part of mental Health Awareness Week Palram DPL of Aycliffe ran various workshops for all employees to attend. As an organisation that is 90% male Palram wanted to break away from the typically male dominated attitude of not sharing your feelings and raise awareness on the taboo subject of Mental Health.
The workshops were delivered by a range of charities and community organisations. They were attended by over 60 employees with a safe environment for them to talk.
It pointed out the differences between stress and pressure in the workplace, how to cope with certain situations, suicide awareness, how a healthy lifestyle can help to better your mental health and the fact that we all could have mental health problems as well as physical health. The local charities included the PCP, The Sally Allan Foundation and If We Care Share.
Stacey Hardman Leading Health advocate said “As an organisation we identified this year a big gap in wellbeing that was not discussed in the workplace, Mental Health after enrolling in the Better Health at Work Award as we knew this was a subject that is not typically talked about within our workplace or industry.
We have set up a team of health advocates on site and after attending training courses we found that our core age and sex of our staff are most at risk group for suicide, so we decided that raising awareness of this was a must to be introduced into our workplace.
We decided on Fun Workshops, using local trainers and professionals to deliver this, as it would benefit our employees and inform them of the broader support network on offer.
We have had really positive feedback and now have people talking, which is what we wanted to achieve. It’s only the start of the journey for us, but we hope these workshops, training courses and widened support network will continue to promote and champion the benefits of talking about our mental health with others”
