Mental Health First Aid and the journey for Sibbald Training

In June 2021 John Sibbald recognised that life had changed for many of the team at Sibbald Training and the change was here to stay for the foreseeable future. People were coping with life through a pandemic which had brought about forced changes and new pressures.

John comments “Questions in my head at the time were things like, was the work life balance right, were people coping with working from home and as the business picked up pace as customers returned to training were the team coping with the demands the business was placing on them?”

As a family run business, the people in the business are key to its success and John decided he wanted to make sure that Sibbald Training did as much as possible to remove the stigma of mental health, make the topic open and approachable at work and ensure that staff are trained to recognise the signs and have support mechanisms when needed.

Fast forward a month to July 2021 and the first 2 Day Mental Health First Aid Course at Sibbald Park, was run by Ann Dunlop. Since then, all staff have been offered the opportunity to attend the course and 3 further courses were run in 2021 with 23 employees attending.

Now more than 50% of our team have attended the course, we feel in a position to share the positive response from our staff who attended along with the benefits to the working environment:

• The course helped on a personal level, to understand my thoughts and feelings and that other people around me may have similar experiences and we are all in it together
• Support is available to talk through things with a variety of mental health first aiders confidentially and without being judged, previously I would never have considered doing this at work
• If I was worried about a college, I feel now I have the confidence to ask them how they are and if they wanted to talk
• I did not release there are so many resources online to help support, the course highlighted lots of useful resources that I can draw on
• Following the course, there have been a lot of good conversations in the office about mental health, with people taking an interest in how each other is doing
• Posters were supplied as part of the course and these have been up around the facility, helping to highlight our approach to delegates and employees alike

Due to the success, we have two further 2 Day Mental Health First Aid Course running over the coming months for 14 more of the team. We would like to thank all our team for embracing this course and breaking the mental health stigma.

If you would like to find out further details about all the mental health courses offered, click here