Future Workforce Mental Health & Wellbeing Project

Health Education England commissioned the College of Paramedics to undertake a ‘Future Workforce Mental Health & Wellbeing Project’ in response to the ongoing psychological risks facing the profession, particularly those working in ambulance services. The three interventions identified as a focus for the Project were: 

  1. Development of curriculum guidance regarding personal mental health and well-being for pre-registration Paramedic training. 
  2. Development of a wellbeing and recovery support tool for use by paramedic students and early career staff in ambulance trusts. 
  3. Development of a learning and development package for student and preceptorship supervisors.

Please watch the video below in which Katie Pavoni (co-Academic Lead) explains more about the focus of the Future Workforce Mental Health project and describes the three interventions in more detail.  

 

Intervention 1

Please see below the new curriculum guidance on personal mental health and wellbeing within pre-registration paramedic training.

This e-booklet provides an overview of the new guidance together with ‘real life’ best practice examples from academic leads on how it is being successfully integrated into the current curriculum.

To help embed this curriculum further, please contact Katie or Emma to sign up to our “community of practice”, this is an online platform where academic leads are brought together to continue to discuss best practice and work collaboratively to integrate the curriculum.

Intervention 2

The second outcome of this project was to develop a wellbeing and recovery support tool.

WRAPT stands for, work, risks, awareness, play & think. 

The aim behind this tool is to provide an opportunity for students to be able to reflect on clinical incidents that they attend from a wellbeing point of view, rather than the traditional assessment technique. The tool is structured in the five areas as above, Work - identify what the incident was, Risk- the emotional risks associated with this incident, Awareness- of feelings as well as support available, Play - how they can relax and recharge ready for the next patient or shift and finally Think – Who can this be sent to?

Please watch the below video of a student paramedic who was part of the pilot study discussing the tool and demonstrating its use:  
 

You can access the WRAPT tool here

Intervention 3

Intervention 3 has seen the development of a hybrid E-learning and face to face package for practice educators.

The main topics that are within this intervention were decided through stakeholder engagement groups that involved both current practice educators and NQP’s to highlight what they felt was important to be included. 


This hybrid package has now been piloted within three ambulance trusts, SWAST, LAS & EMAS. The co-academic leads are now evaluating the valuable feedback received from these sessions and developing training resources to start the dissemination to practice educators within the trust.

We are still in discussion with other ambulance services to deliver this training, please contact Katie or Emma if you would like to take part.

A huge thank you to all those that have given their time freely to this project over the last year, your expertise and commitment has been vital in achieving the developments of these three interventions.