Mental Health First Aid
Mental Health First Aid is a training course which teaches people how to identify, understand and help someone who may be experiencing a mental health issue.
What we’ve done so far
Mental Health First Aid is an accredited training course by Mental Health First Aid England which teaches people how to identify, understand and help someone who may be experiencing a mental health issue. Our aim was to provide Train the trainer for staff across the system with each person then agreeing to run unlimited internal sessions and external sessions for Greater Manchester college staff. Last year we trained three college staff to become MHFA England Instructors. These were from Hopwood Hall, Xaverian and Manchester colleges. This extended the number of trained instructors across Greater Manchester. Currently we’re supporting two further college staff to become Instructors.
Our approach
By extending the number of trained Instructors across Greater Manchester we are able to offer training sessions to our wider partners, enabling more staff to have the basic Mental Health First Aid training sessions. This will greatly increase individual organisation’s ability to support individuals with mental health issues and therefore engage early with those who are experiencing mental health issues such as anxiety, stress or depression. These skills will contribute to increased development and roll out of mental health and wellbeing strategies and policies in individual learning institutions.
Our train the trainer model is immediate, cost effective and simple to do and is helping to increase the capacity for colleges to undertake unlimited training in-house
Next steps
- The first three trained instructors will be delivering three MHFA England two-day Youth Sessions and three x half-day adult sessions to Greater Manchester colleges and partner organisations in May/June 2021
- These will be offered to staff from partner organisations – StreetGames and the Greater Manchester Learning Provider Network as well as one SEND college who missed out last year
- Next year we will be supporting the training of two further Instructors, bringing the total trained through the project over 3 years to seven as well as delivering more sessions to our partner organisations and colleges