Tips for Creating a Healthy Departmental Culture

It’s important to create a culture within your agency that talks openly about mental health challenges that may arise in your profession, and provides education and services that 支持 public safety professionals in their return to work after a post-traumatic injury.

The following are tips to creating a 支持ive work environment for addressing mental health:

• Create, implement, and enforce clear health and safety guidelines and policies. This can include providing education through in-services or guest speakers about symptoms of post-traumatic injury or other mental health injuries. Gaining knowledge can help one understand what they are feeling. This can help address early identification, 支持, and treatment for mental health symptoms associated with post-traumatic injury, 倦怠, 或者药物滥用. It is also important to establish rules prohibiting harassment towards those who have sought mental health treatment and those who may be returning to work, as well as a process for investigating complaints and consequences for violations.
• Establish programs and talk about and promote those programs frequently. Peer 支持 teams and mental health check-ins are examples of two good program options for your department. 你可以 learn more about these in the Mental Health Programs section.
• Provide an employee assistance program (EAP). EAPs can offer a therapeutic intervention that is employer-sponsored and designed to assist employees in coping with and resolving a variety of personal or work-related issues.
• Reduce stigma by promoting normalizing conversations about mental health. We all have mental health; mental health should not be viewed with a negative connotation. The spectrum of where each person lies in regard to current mental health status varies greatly. Being willing to discuss the concept of general mental health makes it more acceptable and easier for employees to discuss and acknowledge where they may lie on the spectrum of mental health status. Leaders who are willing to discuss their own mental health status, 担忧, 和经验, can create a work environment where employees feel empowered and safe to share their own experiences.
• Include mental health training within promotional or supervisory/management training. This can help promote the idea of acceptance and also contribute to reducing the mental health stigma. This also can help provide supervisors with various tools, 澳门网络娱乐游戏平台, and knowledge that can help them respond effectively when mental health 担忧 within employees arise.
• Create the most positive work environment that you can. A work environment that employees enjoy can help reduce work-related stress, and as a result can improve job satisfaction, 工作生产, 和性能. This can be done through recognizing and rewarding employees, investing in employees through professional training and career development, offering benefits that promote work-life balance, and welcoming employees to contribute ideas and provide feedback in decision-making processes related to their work.
• Make it easy for employees to practice healthy coping strategies in response to symptoms. This could include providing the opportunity to exercise on shift, having healthy and nutritional food items readily available, offering a meditation room or sauna, as well as implementing mental health wellness check-ins.
• Provide education on unhealthy coping strategies. Help your department understand what may unnecessarily escalate symptoms, 比如过量的咖啡因, 尼古丁, 滥用酒精.
• Provide an opportunity for staff to remain connected in a healthy way. This can be done through peer 支持 programming, as well as other departmental-sponsored activities, 比如部门聚餐, 社区服务计划, 高尔夫锦标赛, 或其他体能活动. This allows for opportunity to heal, feel 支持 and a sense of community, where focus is not on discussing symptoms or traumas.

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