Taking action to improve mental health has become a hot issue over the last couple of years and Usdaw is playing its part by running a national campaign to tackle the issue in the workplace. The idea is to give Reps and organisers the skills and knowledge to work with employers to develop good policies, recognise symptoms and signpost people to sources of help.

It’s a campaign that is almost tailor made to work in partnership with one of Usdaw’s other campaigns – lifelong learning. And that’s just what Lawrence Miller; the Lifelong Learning Project Worker in the Southern Division is doing with Morrisons Reps in the Division.

Lawrence said: 

I have a local provider, Sussex Downs College, who can offer the Distance Learning course on Mental Health, but it’s hard and time consuming to successfully promote the course in individual workplaces.”

So, I thought a better way was to get the Reps together for a briefing on mental health. They could discuss the issues and I could then show them how taking the course would give them the skills and knowledge to tackle it in the workplace”.

The college was keen to run a session and got together with Lawrence to devise the content.

Lawrence explained:

We decided that our overall aim was to link in with Usdaw’s campaign and give the Reps a chance to discuss the problems of mental health and how it affects sickness and attendance.”

Hopefully people would be inspired to sign up for the course and take up the issue with their own management teams.”

The key activities were around recognising symptoms of mental illness.

People really related to this and most people were able to see people in their own workplace with similar symptoms. That really bought home the reality of the campaign.”

The tutor was also able to link this learning to the content of the Distance learning course and at the end of the session 26 reps signed up to take the eight-week course.

Lawrence is pleased with the way things have developed and said:

That’s a tremendous result. It means we now have 26 Reps who will know more about how to tackle the issue and who will have the skills to help individual members.”

We now have 26 advocates for learning who can promote the course to the staff in their stores and persuade their managers to take it as well so there the chance of developing a joint approach to tackling mental health.”