What are the benefits of First Aid Training for Mental Health?

The main benefit is increased practical skills and confidence to have what may be deemed as difficult conversations. Ultimately, this could help save lives. You’ll also learn about the range of signs and symptoms to look out for. You’ll learn how to guide someone to further support. You’ll learn how to make improvements to your workplace so that it’s a better, healthier place to be.

What’s the background of First Aid for Mental Health?

First Aid training for Mental Health has gained a lot of traction over the last few years. This is fantastic news, as more and more workplaces look to support their most valuable asset – their people. 

Looking after mental wellbeing is just as important as physical wellbeing. One in 4 adults experiences a mental health condition in any given year, and mental health conditions are the largest single cause of disability in the UK (according to NICE).

A government commissioned report, ‘Thriving at Work’ also found that mental health costs employers between £33 billion and £42 billion a year. Over half of this cost comes from ‘presenteeism’ – when individuals are less productive due to poor mental health in work. There are also additional costs from sickness absence and staff turnover.

Clearly, there’s still a lot to do to improve these statistics, for workplaces, the economy and ultimately for society.

What is First Aid training for Mental Health?

Mental health affects every aspect of our lives. The aim of such training courses is to normalise conversations around mental health, raise awareness, reduce stigma, and ultimately help people to get the level of support they need to have good mental health. 

Think about it like this, when we experience a cut and we bleed, we patch it up. Sometimes we can do this ourselves or sometimes another person provides the first aid. During life, we all experience situations that can knock our sense of self and our mental wellbeing. Do you administer some self care or talk it through if needs be? Generally, people are not great at doing this, and can be guilty of just cracking on and letting things build up. Now, there’s obviously a lot more to mental health issues than ‘just cracking on’, but hopefully the analogy provides some perspective. 

First Aid for Mental Health – the Life Saving Training Way!

As with everything we do, we’re all about training being useful, otherwise what’s the point? So when we take this approach to Mental Health at Work training, our focus is on giving people real life skills and confidence to help others who may be in a crisis. Yes, these situations are often daunting, and people worry about saying the ‘wrong thing’, but ultimately to be effective as a ‘First Aider’ they need to be skilled and confident to use those skills.

There are mental health courses out there that see the value in going in to a LOT of detail about various mental health conditions, but lack focus on real life skills to confidently hold conversations. Would you fancy sitting through a theory heavy course, and only towards the end have a go of supporting someone in need? As with our physical first aid courses, we use a systematic approach that we’ve developed to build the necessary skills bit by bit. This approach builds confidence through practice in a safe training environment. You wouldn’t learn to drive a car by only completing your theory test! 

How can we help?

At Life Saving Training, we want more people to have the skills and confidence to help others. Not only have we stretchered injured people off the sides of hillsides, but we’ve had conversations with people on the wrong side of a bridge. We’ve had conversations with people who couldn’t see a way out of an abusive relationship. We’ve recognised when people have needed help in a multitude of situations and offered information, advice and support. 

Want the skills and confidence to help? Want your workplace to embrace mental wellbeing? Let’s make a difference together. Just get in touch to discuss your requirements – we love to help!