The following headline and reporting concerns me greatly. As many individuals and organsiations are facing the issue of mental health head on and at least attempting to do something we have a report that states:

"There is no evidence that the introduction of Mental Health First Aid (MHFA) training programmes has improved the management of mental health in workplaces, according to a research report by the UK Health and Safety Executive (HSE)."

Followed by the equally negative:

"The researchers said they were unable to state whether “the introduction of MHFA training in workplaces has resulted in sustained actions by those receiving the training or that it has improved the management of mental health in the workplace”.  They note "this finding may be due to a lack of research so far". 

So the report has no evidence either way, it is unable to state anything of value and acknowledges the findings may be due to a lack of research. This says more about the deficiencies in the research than it does about mental health in the work place.  Those employers addresing the issue in the work place are not physicians and may not have alll the answers, but if there is a message in this research (which undermines the efforts of many,  successful or otherwise without evidence) it is not worthy at this juncture of reporting it. I have failed to see  the purpose. I and the colleagues who attended my course came out wiser than we went in... and probably with more knowledge than can be gained from this article.

Edited by user 24 August 2018 11:44:17(UTC)  | Reason: spelling

To be fair to the HSE, all they are doing is reporting the evidence, so far. Which is that no one has yet demonstrated the efficacy of this training. They haven't said it doesn't work - just that so far ther is little or no peer reviewed quality evidence to show if it works or not. This should / could encourage someone to carry out the research .. .. Its important that evidence based practice is used to determine what does and does not work - especially perhaps when dealing with mental health (like I say tp employers - if I screw up a manual handling assessment - I can live with that, screw up a fire risk assessment - end of business / multiple fatalaities) mental health is too important to be left to the realms of "it sounded like it should work, so we'll give it a try" - suicide is way to big a cause of death in the work-aged population

 Has recieved any feedback about the value of MHFA training or having MHFA trained people on site?  We have a lot of trained Mental health first aiders and a regular invite to attend two day courses, but my requests for feedback have  yeilded nothing beyond comments that this is a serious subject and managers are committed to addressing the problem.

Which is great, but do theses courses offer a useful product and is it ever put to the test in the workplace? If any one has any feedback i would really like to know.

For the record we have more MHFA than FAW, at least I know what the latter group do.

Nic