We are currently and will be for some time yet, living and working in strange times which brings new challenges and stress to our daily lives. This is something that most of us will never have experienced in our lifetime. Thankfully times are changing and people are generally opening up and talking about mental health and wellbeing. This means that we have a much better awareness and understanding of these types of conditions, yet many people aren’t actively seeking help.
According to The World Health Organisation (“WHO”), one in four people will suffer from a mental health condition during their lifetime so how do you look after the mental wellbeing of your employees, let alone during a pandemic, to ensure their welfare? How do you keep them socially engaged with their colleagues and motivated if they’re working remotely? These are questions amongst a million and one others that I’m sure a lot of businesses are asking themselves right now.
Some of our clients have taken out employee benefits covers, which will include support services like counselling and GP helplines and we will have written to you at renewal to highlight these. Those of you that have private medical insurance through BHIB Limited (“BHIB”) will have received a recent communication from us explaining which services you and your employees can access remotely during the pandemic. But what if you don’t have any of these benefits in place?
This year, the Mental Health Foundation are running the ‘Mental Health Awareness Week’ which is taking place between 18th and 24th of May 2020. The theme this year is ‘Kindness’ and knowing how precious your time is we wanted to reach out to all of our clients, not just those that have health related employee benefits, to provide a central hub of information that we hope will enable you to take care of your own, your family’s and employees’ mental wellbeing.
The Mental Health Foundation
A great place to start is the Mental Health Foundation themselves who have created a Coronavirus Toolkit. This includes dedicated guides to looking after your mental health during the COVID-19 outbreak. Some of the key topics covered here are:
- Loneliness during the Coronavirus
- Mental health tips
- Working from home
- Living with the pandemic if you have an existing mental health condition
The NHS Website
The NHS has a webpage including phone numbers and links to a range of helplines and organisations that can support multiple mental health needs. You can access this here: NHS Mental Health Helplines. This will signpost you and/or your employees to support including but not limited to:
- Anxiety
- Parenting
- Relationships
- Substance abuse
Babylon
Babylon is a company that provides digital GP services, and they’ve created a video which includes some very practical tips around adapting your usual daily routine to tackle the potential of increased anxiety during the pandemic. This includes staying connected with friends, family and colleagues, introducing a constructive activity to replace your daily commute and ways to keep calm. You can view this here: Coronavirus Dealing with Anxiety .
Babylon also include a free symptom checking service via their app which has been updated to include Coronavirus and is available to download on Apple and Android devices.
We appreciate that this is a totally unique period of time that we’re going through and we understand that sadly these resources aren’t going to solve everybody’s problems but hopefully they will help by providing you with some easily accessible information if anybody needs it.
If you’re wondering whether you may have mental health support services via any of your employee benefits, regardless of whether BHIB currently manage them for you, please don’t hesitate to contact our Employee Benefits team who will provide you with as much guidance as possible. Their contact details are below:
Tel: 0116 2819 292
This article was written by Medilink East Midlands Patron, BHIB Insurance.
For more details on Medilink East Midlands Patronage, click here
