The charity MIND reports on their mental health first aid course developed in Australia that is now being rolled out in Scotland, Canada, England and Northern Ireland
I think this a wonderful idea, bringing it right home to everyone. It seems that often people feel lost as to what to do in a situation when people appear in distress. This course which aims to give people some basic skills and ideas of what to do and where people can get help may well mean that more people will be able to help. The last thing most people need when they are not doing well is to feel alone and this intervention may well encourage many more people to be supportive and help others in distress to get the help they need.
This report by a research team from the University of Glamorgan evaluates the course (using Kirkpatrick Model) and can be found here
And it found that
- 96% of people felt confident or better prepared to help a person experiencing mental distress after the course.
- 65% of people had used the skills they learnt on the course on at least one occasion.
However it was also shown that
- 88% of people had either tried to raise awareness of mental health issues in their workplace as a result of the training or will do so when the opportunity arises
Which suggest that the people attending already had quite an interest in the subject and were there because they wanted to know and were therefore more likely to not only take in the information, but also to use it which would positively skew these results. It would be interesting to look at the results of this questionnaire when people were attending because of other reasons, for instance their job, to see the difference.
The courses are being run all over England for everyone: the general public, charities and organisations and for corporations. Visit this site to find one to suit you. http://www.mhfaengland.org/
No comments:
Post a Comment