The Blue Light Programme offers information and services for those working within the emergency services industry to ensure support for their mental health impacted by the continued effects of COVID-19.
Originally starting in 2015 and continued into 2019, this service will now run until February 2022, building on the existing work that has come out of the programme.
Funded by the Royal Foundation and working alongside many emergency services charities such as, the Fire Fighters Charity. All challenging the public attitudes and media representation about the ongoing work from frontline staff.
This programme carried out research on the experiences of those working in health industry during this time. These findings come from 3,812 people working or volunteering in police, ambulance, and fire services.
In these results it was found that Ambulance staff were the most likely to say that their mental health has deteriorated. Reasons include constant increase of workload, exposure to traumatic events and companies said that they struggled to support staff. Creating many long-term impacts for all involved.
On the website for this programme there is a collection of booklets on ways in which first responders can get support.
Such as: blue-light-managing-mental-wellbeing-ambulance-2017.pdf (mind.org.uk)
Another section of this service talks about supporting the people you work with, advocating for mental health even if you have not faced the challenges that come with it before.
The Time to Change Employer Pledge was created to help towards changing the way we all think and act about mental health within the workplace. This pledge ending up stopping in June 2020, but information is still available on the website about the impact it has created. The Blue Light Programme also offers various training, they are currently working towards develop new training. This training will be offered from June 2021 until January 2022.
Previous training courses from this programme were:
- Managing mental health in the emergency services
- 999 call handler training
- New recruits training
- Peer support training
- Building resilience in the emergency services
- Blue Light trauma awareness.
Everyone will be affected by mental health issues at some point in their lives, help to take away the stigma.
Find more information on mental health here: https://www.halostaffing.co.uk/everything-mental-health
