Mental Health Awareness Week

Mental Health Awareness Week

 

This week’s Mental Health Awareness campaign provides a timely reminder to reflect after a particularly difficult year. Health and safety teams have played a significant role in supporting agencies through the COVID-19 pandemic, reminding us of the importance of supporting the mental health and wellbeing of our people. However, as we look to continually improve our mental health efforts as a sector, we know we can’t solely rely on individuals to just be more resilient and manage stress better. Our focus must shift to how we're designing work, and put measures in place to make work more manageable and sustainable, even at the top levels. This is more important than ever as we navigate continual challenges and work demands in the current COVID-19 environment.

The theme for this year’s Mental Health Awareness Week is ‘Reimagine Wellbeing Together’. This is a fitting theme as the Government Health and Safety Lead (GHSL) works with agencies to reimagine a public sector that focuses more of its mental health and wellbeing efforts on designing mentally healthy workplaces. The GHSL work programme for 2020/21 will support agencies to navigate this shift, aligning to WorkSafe’s recently released position statement on Mentally Healthy Work. Click here to read the position statement(external link).

We spoke with Phil Parkes, Chief Executive of WorkSafe New Zealand, about WorkSafe’s focus on better work and their Mentally Healthy Work programme. Watch the video here:

 

GHSL interview with Phil Parkes

 

Nicole Rosie from NZTA

Nicole Rosie from Waka Kotahi New Zealand Transport Agency shared with us her journey leading an organisation through a global pandemic and how this changed their perspective of mental health. Read what Nicole has to say about mentally healthy work here.

 

Government Health and Safety Lead resources:

 

Other links and resources: