The Connecting with People mental health training programmes

The Connecting with People mental health training programmes have been purposefully designed to provide a whole organisational approach to meet the training needs of a broad spectrum of sectors. This approach enables us to easily embed best practice and governance, with training designed for real impact and improvement of individual and organisational working practices around suicide prevention and mitigation.

Their programmes reflect the latest evidence-based principles and best practice and have been extensively peer-reviewed by international experts in mental health, people with lived experience, practitioners and third sector (NGO) experts. As part of our MHCB overarching improvement plan, we have been utilising the 4MentalHealth training programme for the past 2 years and have over 300 individuals trained in this methodology across all professions.

We are now a licenced organisation and are therefore able to utilise our own staff as trainers. Following successful completion of an extensive pilot, we are now expanding our team of trainers from 6 to 10 utilising GBP-19140 from our HEIW MH workforce development fund allocation.

This has been approved by HEIW and is being replicated in other UHB’s. If we were to utilise another provider, there would be huge negative consequences – financially, operationally and strategically. Prior to initiating this programme, a number of providers were evaluated however none had the scope or expertise to offer training at such a high standard as 4Mental Health.