and ran through the support that is available to us all via the Togetherall app. CA has negotiated for us to have free subscriptions to this for all members of our local teams and reports indicate that many of us have found it very helpful in suporting good work life balance and wellbeing for various team members – both paid and volunteers.

Her role is mainly focussedon natinoal and she is keen to also work with local services.

She also updated us on the CA EmploymentAssistance Programme- they have negotiated a reduced price for their provider which we could also access.

Togetherall is a 24 hour online faclity – with peer support groups and a library of materials for people to use. The platform is professionally monitored with stringent risk management behind the scenes so we can be reassured that people won’t be left hanging if they need help.

We can find more info on the Intranet – running a local office – under health and safety- with info on how to access it. When the app is used there is an anonymous login that is used and stats that go to CA are also anonymised. The page looks like other social media ones and you can customise your feed to exclude any topics that may be triggering to you.

There are various groups you can join and a wide range of self help courses which are the same as ones you would access via the NHS – they are self paced as they are online .

There is also a facility to do some self analysis to see what the site has to offer that may be of use to you. There are also pre loaded materials about te service which we can then use in our teams- we can also sign up to their updates and they will provide pre populated resources for various events – eg MH awareness week.

Noted that this service is one element of a toolkit/approach in our teams – it isn’t intended as the full answer for everyone on all issues- we may do a survey to check out how people have found the service and if it dosen’t work then what they thought would work/ were looking for.

CA has a dedicated staff member – Emily- who is v happy to come to a meeting of our teams and to showcase and walk through what is on offer. Emily can do this remotely or poss in person (depending on where we are). She also does recordings that can be shared with peeps who can’t attend. She can also tailor for things that are hot topics for us – eg vicarious trauma.

We noted that our frontliner staff have more stress and strain than ver before – eg more clients expressing suicidal ideation tan ever before. Some of us now offer reflective practice (clinical supervision) and we can share more info about this. Many of us now operate buddy systems and suicide awareness training for our teams.

Angela in Somerset is working towards trauma informed services – there are several levels of this from awareness to more detailed understanding. We felt this could be particularly helpful especially for our volunteers. Nelson Trust are delivering this for Angela’s team.

EAPs offer a range of services for employees (rather than volunteers) – they offer things like legal advice, short term focussed counselling etc. This is offered by TELUS – they offer paid for solutions and we would need to check which offer ight work for us – the discount rate is £7.80 per person per year with no minimum fee- and might be worth checking out further.

Here are Zoe’s notes for us:

and here is the intro movie …